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THE AUTOCRAT 



or THE 



BREAKFAST-TABLE 



EVERY MAN HIS OWN BOSWELL 



BY 

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 



Reprinted from the Atlantic Menthly, as it appeared froa 
Nov., 1857, to Oct., 18^8 . 



NEW YORK 
THE MERSHON COMPANY 

pr;r.iT;s:iERs 



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Jufy 18,1931 




THE ATJTOCEAT 

OF THE 

BREAKFAST-TABLE 



EVERY MAN HIS OWN BOSWELL. 
I. 

I WAS just going to say, when I was inter- 
rupted, that one of the many ways of classify- 
ing minds is under the heads of aritlimeticai 
and algebraical intellects. All economical and 
practical wisdom is an extension or varia- 
tion of the following arithmetical formula: 
24-^=4. Every philcsophicai proposition has 
the more general character of the expression 
a+&=c. We are mere operatives, empirics, 
and egotists, until we learn to think in letters 
instead of figures. 

They all stared. There is a divinity-student 
lately come among us to whom I commonly 
address remarks like the above, allowing Mm 
to take a certain share in the conversation, so 
far as assent or pertinent questions are in- 
volved. He abused his liberty on this occasion 
by presuming to say that Leibnitz had ni'.de 
the same observation. — No, sir, I replied, he 
has not. But he said a mighty good thing 



^ THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

about mathematics, that sounds something like 
it, and you found it, not in the original, but 
quoted by Dr. Thomas Reid. I will tell the 
company what he did say, one of these days. 

If I belong to a society of Mutual 

Admiration? — I blush to say that I do not at 
this present moment. I once did, however. It 
was the first association to which I ever heard 
the term applied; a body of scientific young 
men in a great foreign city who admired their 
teacher, and to some extent each other. Many 
of them deserved it; they have become famous 
since. It amuses me to hear the talk of one of 
those beings described by Thackeray — 

" Letters four do form his name " — 

about a social development which belongs to 
the very noblest stage of civilization. All 
generous companies of artists, authors, philan- 
thropists, men of science, are, or ought to be. 
Societies of Mutual Admiration. A man of 
genius, or any kind of superiority, is not de- 
barred from admiring the same quality in 
another, nor the other from returning his 
admiration. They may even associate together 
and continue to think highly of each other. 
And so of a dozen such men, if any one place is 
fortunate enough to hold so many. The being 
referred to above assumes several false premises. 
Pirst, that men of talent necessarily hate each 
other. Secondly, that intimate knowledge or 
habitual association destroys our admiration of 
persons whom we esteemed highly at a distance. 
Thirdly, that a circle of clever fellows, who 
-meet together to dine and Lave a good time, 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 



have signed a constitiTtional compact to glorifj 
themselves and put down him and the fraction 
of the human race not belonging to their num- 
ber. Fourthly, that it is an outrage that he is 
not asked to join them. 

Here the company laughed a good deal, and 
the old gentleman who sits opposite said^ 
"That's it! that's it!" 

I continued, for I was in the talking vein. 
As to clever people's hating each other, I think 
a little extra talent does sometimes make people 
jealous. They become irritated by perpetual 
attempts and failures, and it hurts their tem- 
pers and dispositions. Unpretending medi- 
ocrity is good, and genius is glorious; but a 
weak flavor of genius in an essentially common 
person is detestable. It spoils the grand neu- 
trality of a commonplace character, as the 
rinsings of an unwashed wineglass spoil a 
draught of fair water. No wonder the poor 
fellow we spoke of, who always belongs to this 
class of slightly flavored mediocrities, is 
puzzled and vexed by the strange sight of a 
dozen men of capacity working and placing 
together in harmony. He and his fellows are 
always fighting. With them familiarity natu- 
rally breeds contempt. If they ever praise 
each other's bad drawings, or l3roken-winded 
novels, or spavined verses, nobody ever sup- 
posed it was from admiration: it was simply a 
contract between themselves and a publisher 
or dealer. 

If the Mutuals have really nothing among 
them worth admiring, that alters the nuestion. 
But if they are men with noble powers and 



4 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

qualities, let me tell you, that, next to youth- 
ful love and family affections, there is no 
human sentiment better than that which unites 
the Societies of Mutual Admiration. And 
what would literature or art be without such 
association? Who can tell what we owe to the 
Mutual Admiration Society of which Shaks- 
peare, and Ben Jonson, and Beaumont, and 
Fletcher were members? Or to that of which 
Addison and Steele formed the center, and 
which gave us the Spectator? Or to that where 
Johnson, and Goldsmith, and Burke, and Rey- 
nolds, and Beauclerk, and Boswell, most admir- 
ing among all admirers, met together? Was 
there any great harm in the fact that the Ir- 
vings and Paulding wrote in company? or any 
unpardonable cabal in the literary union of 
Verplanck and Bryant and Sands, and as many 
more as they chose to associate with them? 

The poor creature does not know what he is 
talking about, when he abuses this noblest of 
institutions. Let him inspect its mysteries 
through the knot-hole he has secured, but not 
use that orifice as a medium for his pop-gun. 
Such a society is the crown of a literary 
metropolis: if a town has not material for it, 
and spirit and good feeling enough to organize 
it, it is a mere caravansary, fit for a man of 
gersius to lodge in, but not to live in. Foolish 
people hate and dread and envy such an asso- 
ciation of men of varied powers and influence, 
because it is lofty, serene, impregnable, and, 
by the necessity of the case. exHusive. Wise 
o-pes are prouder of the title M. S. M. A. than 
of all their other honors irat toj^ether. 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 



All generous minds have a horror of 

what are commonly called "facts." They are 
the brute beasts of the intellectual domain. 
Who does not know fellows that always have an 
ill-conditioned fact or two that they lead after 
them into decent company like so many bull- 
dogs, ready to let them slip at every ingenious 
suggestion, or convenient generalization, or 
pleasant fancy? I allow no "facts" at this table. 
What! Because bread is good and wholesome 
and necessary and nourishing, shall you thrust 
a crumb into my windpipe while I am talking? 
Do not these muscles of mine represent a hun- 
dred loaves of bread? and is not my thought 
the abstract of ten thousand of these crumbs 
of truth with which you would choke off my 
speech ? 

[The above remark must be conditioned and 
qualified for the vulgar mind. The reader will 
of course understand the precise amount of 
seasoning which must be added to it before he 
adopts it as one of the axioms of his life. The 
speaker disclaims all responsibility for its abuse 
in incompetent hands.] 

This business of conversation is a very seri- 
ous matter. There are men that it weakens 
one to talk with an hour more than a day's fast- 
ing would do. Mark this that I am going to 
say, for it is as good as a worldng professional 
man's advice, and costs you nothing: It is bet- 
ter to lose a pint of blood from your veins 
than to have a nerve tapped. Nobody meas- 
ures your nervous force as it runs away, nor 
bandages your brain and marrow after the 
operation. 



€ THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

There are men of esprit who are excessively 
exhausting to some people. They are the talk- 
ers that have what may be called jerhy minds. 
Their thoughts do not run in the natural order 
■of sequence. They say bright things on all 
possible subjects, but their zigzags rack you to 
death. After a jolting half-hour with one of 
these jerky companions, talking with a dull 
friend affords great relief. It is like taking the 
€at in your lap after holding a squirrel. 

What a comfort a dull but kindly person is, 
to be sure, at times! A ground-glass shade 
over a gas lamp does not bring more solace to 
our dazzled eyes than such a one to our minds. 

" Do not dull people bore you? " said one of 
the lady-boarders, — the same that sent me her 
autograph book last week with a request for 
a few original stanzas, not remembering that 
TJie Pactolian pays me five dollars a line for 
everything I write in its columns. 

" Madam," said I, (she and the century were 
in their teens together,) " all men are bores, 
except when we want them. There never was 
but one man that I would trust v/ith my latch- 
key." 

" Who might that favored person be ? " 

" ZimmermanD." 

The men of genius that I fancy most have 
erectile heads like the cobra-di-capello. You 
remember what they tell of William Pinkney, 
the great pleader; how in his eloquent paTox- 
ysms the veins of his neck would swell and his 
face flush and his eyes glitter, until he seemed 
on the verge of apoplexy. The hydraulic ar- 
rangements for supplying the brain with blood 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 



are only second in importance to its own or- 
ganization. The bulbous-headed fellows that 
steam well when they are at work are the men 
that draw big audiences and give us marrowy 
books and pictures. It is a good sign to have 
one's feet grow cold when he is writing. A 
great writer and speaker once told me that he 
often w^rote with his feet in hot water; but for 
this^ all his blood would have run into his head, 
as the mercury sometimes withdraws into the 
ball of the thermometer. 

You don't suppose that my remarks 

made at this table are like so many postage- 
stamps, do you, — each to be only once uttered? 
If you do, you are mistaken. He must be a 
poor creature that does not often repeat him- 
self. Imagine the author of the excellent piece 
of advice, " Know thyself," never alluding to 
that sentiment again during the course of a 
protracted existence! Why, the truths a man 
carries about with him are his tools; and do you 
think a carpenter is bound to use the same 
plane but once to smooth a knotty board with, 
or to hang up his hammer after it has driven 
its first nail? I shall never repeat a conversa- 
tion, but an idea often. I shall use the same 
types when I like, but not commonly the same 
stereotypes. A thought is often original, though 
you have uttered it a hundred times. It has 
come to you over a new route, by a new and 
express train of associations. 

Sometimes, but rarely, one may be caught 
making the same speech twice over, and yet be 
held blameless. Thus, a certain lecturer, after 
performing in nr^ inland city, where dwells a 



8 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

Litteratrice of note, was invited to meet her an(3 
others over the social teacup. She pleasantly 
referred to his many wanderings in his new 
occupation. " Yes/' he replied, " I am like the 
Huma, the bird that never lights, being always 
in the cars, as he is always on the wing." 
— Years elapsed. The lecturer visited the same 
place once more for the same purpose. 
Another social cup after the lecture, and a 
second meeting with the distinguished lady. 
^^ You are constantly going from place to 
place," she said. — " Yes," he answered, " I am 
like the Huma," — and finished the sentence as 
before. 

What horrors, when it flashed over him that 
he had made this fine speech, word for word, 
twice over! Yet it was not true, as the lady 
might perhaps have fairly inferred, that he had 
embellished his conversation with the Huma 
daily during that whole interval of years. On 
the contrary, he had never once thought of the 
odious fowl until the recurrence of precisely the 
same circumstances brought up precisely the 
same idea. He ought to have been proud of 
the accuracy of his mental adjustments. Given 
certain factors, and a sound brain should 
always evolve the same fixed product with the 
certainty of Babbage's calculating machine. 

What a satire, by the way, is that 

machine on the mere mathematician! A 
Frankenstein-monster, a thing without brains 
and without heart, too stupid to make a blun- 
der; that turns out formulae like a corn-sheller^ 
and never grows any wiser or Ijetter, though 
it ffrind a thousand bushels of them! 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 9 

I have an immense respect for a man of 
talents plus " the mathematics." But the cal- 
cuhiting power alone should seem to be the 
least human of qualities, and to have the 
smallest amount of reason in it; since a 
machine can be made to do the work of three 
or four calculators, and better than any one of 
them. Sometimes I have been troubled that 1 
have not a deeper intuitive apprehension of 
the relations of numbers. But the triumph of 
the ciphering hand-organ has consoled me. I 
always fancy I can hear the wheels clicking in 
a calculator's brain. The power of dealing 
with numbers is a kind of " detached lever " 
arrangement, which may be put into a mighty 
poor w^atch. I suppose it is about as common 
as the power of moving the ears voluntarily, 
which is a moderately rare endowment. 

Little localized powers, and little nar- 
row streaks of specialized knowledge, are things 
men are very apt to be conceited about. Na- 
ture is very wise; but for this encouraging 
principle how many small talents and little 
accomplishments would be neglected! Talk 
about conceit as much as you like, it is to 
human character what salt is to the ocean; it 
keeps it sweet, and renders it endurable. Say 
rather it is like the natural unguent of the 
sea-fowl's plumage, which enables him to shed 
the rain that falls on him and the wave in 
which he dips. When one has had all his con- 
ceit taken out of him, when he has lost all his 
illusions, his feathers will soon soak through, 
and he will fiy no more. 

So you admire conceited people, do you? 



10 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

said the young lady who has come to the cii;/ 
to be finished off for — the duties of life. 

I am afraid you do not study logic at your 
school, my dear. It does not follow that I wish 
to be pickled in brine because I like a salt- 
water plunge at Nahant. I say that conceit is 
just as natural a thing to human minds as a 
center is to a circle. But little-minded peo- 
ple's thoughts move in such small circles that 
five minutes' conversation gives you an arc long 
enough to determine their whole curve. An 
arc in the movement of a large intellect does 
not sensibly differ from a straight line. Even 
if it have the third vowel as its center, it does 
not soon betray it. The highest thought, that 
is, is the most seemingly impersonal; it does 
not obviously imply any individual center. 

Audacious self-esteem, with good ground for 
it, is always imposing. What resplendent 
beauty that must have been which could have 
authorized Phryne to " peel " in the way she 
did! What fine speeches are those two: "Non 
omnis moriar/' and " I have taken all knowl- 
edge to be my province"! Even in common 
people, conceit has the virtue of making them 
cheerful; the man who thinks his wife, his 
baby, his house, his horse, his dog, and him- 
self severally unequaled, is almost sure to be a 
good-humored person, though liable to be 
tedious at times. 

What are the great faults of conversa- 
tion? Want of ideas, want of words, want of 
manners, are the principal ones, I suppose you 
think. I don't doubt it, but I will tell you 
what T have found spoil more good talks than 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 11 

anything else; — long arguments on special 
points between people who differ on the funda- 
mental principles upon which these points de- 
pend. No men can have satisfactory relations 
with each other until they have agreed on cer- 
tain ultimata of belief not to be disturbed in 
ordinary conversation, and unless they have 
sense enough to trace the secondary questions 
depending upon these ultimate beliefs to their 
source. In short, just as a written constitu- 
tion is essential to the best social order, so a 
€ode of finalities is a necessary condition of 
profitable talk between two persons. Talking 
is like playing on the harp; there is as much in 
laying the hand on the strings to stop their 
vibrations as in twanging them to bring out 
their music. 

Do you mean to say the pun-question 

is not clearly settled in your minds? Let me 
lay down the law upon the subject. Life and 
language are alike sacred. Homicide and ver- 
micide — that is, violent treatment of a word 
with fatal results to its legitimate meaning, 
which is its life — are alike forbidden. Man- 
slaughter, which is the meaning of the one, is 
the same as man's laughter, which is the end 
of the other. A pun is prima facie an insult to 
the person you are talking with. It implies 
iTtter indifference to or sublime contempt for 
Ms remarks, no matter how serious. I speak of 
total depravity, and one says that all that is 
written on the subject is deep raving. I have 
committed my self-respect by talking with such 
:a person. I should like to commit him, but 
cannot, because he is a nuisance. Or I speak 



12 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

of geological convulsions, and he asks me what 
was the cosine of Noah's ark; also, whether 
the Deluge was not a deal huger than any 
modern inundation. 

A pun does not commonly justify a blow in 
return. But if a blow were given for such 
cause, and death ensued, the jury would be 
judges both of the facts and of the pun, and 
might, if the latter were of an aggravated 
character, return a verdict of justifiable homi- 
cide. Thus, in a case lately decided before 
Miller, J., Doe presented Eoe a subscription 
paper, and urged the claims of suffering hu- 
manity. Eoe replied by asking, When charity 
was like a top? It was in evidence that Doe 
preserved a dignified silence. Eoe then said, 
" When it begins to hum.'' Doe then — and 
not till then — struck Eoe, and his head hap- 
pening to strike a bound volume of the 
Monthly Eag-Bag and Stolen Miscellany, in- 
tense mortification ensued, with a fatal result. 
The chief laid down his notions of the law to 
his brother justices, who unanimously replied: 
" Jest so." The chief rejoined, that no man 
should jest so without being punished for it, 
and charged for the prisoner, who was acquit- 
ted, and the pun ordered to be burned by the 
sheriff. The bound volume was forfeited as a 
deodand, but not claimed. 

People that make puns are like wanton boys 
that put coppers on the railroad tracks. They 
amuse themselves and other children, but their 
little trick may upset a freight train of con- 
versation for the sake of a battered witticism. 

I will thank you, B. F., to bring down two 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 13 

books, of which I will mark the places on this 
slip of paper. (While he is gone, I may say 
that this boy, our landlady's youngest, is called 
Benjamin Franklin, after the celebrated phi- 
losopher of that name. A highly merited com- 
pliment.) 

I wished to refer to two eminent authorities. 
Now be so good as to listen. The great moral- 
ist says: " To trifle with the vocabulary which 
is the vehicle of social intercourse is to tamper 
with the currency of human intelligence. He 
who would violate the sanctities of his mother 
tongue would invade the recesses of the pater- 
nal till without remorse, and repeat the banquet 
of Saturn without an indigestion." 

And, once more, listen to the historian: 
'^' The Puritans hated puns. The Bishops were 
notoriously addicted to them. The Lords Tem- 
poral carried them to the verge of license. 
Majesty itself must have its Eoyal quibble. 
* Ye be burly, my Lord of Burleigh,' said Queen 
Elizabeth, ' but ye shall make less stir in our 
realm than my Lord of Leicester.' The grav- 
est wisdom and the highest breeding lent their 
sanction to the practice. Lord Bacon playfully 
declared himself a descendant of 'Og, the King 
of Bashan. Sir Philip Sidney, with his last 
breath, reproached the soldier who brought 
him water for w^asting a casque full upon a 
dying man. A courtier, who saw Othello per- 
formed at the Globe Theater, remarked that 
the blackamoor was a brute, and not a man. 
^ Thou hast reason,' replied a great Lord, ' ac- 
<3ording to Plato his saying; for this be a two- 
legged animal with feathers.' The fatal habit 



14 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

became universal. The language was cor- 
rupted. The inflection spread to the national 
conscience. Political double-dealings naturally 
grew out of verbal double-meanings. The teeth 
of the new dragon were sown by the Cadmus 
who introduced the alphabet of equivocation. 
What was levity in the time of the Tudors 
grew to regicide and revolution in the age of 
the Stuarts." 

Who was that boarder that just whispered 
something about the Macaulay-flowers of litera- 
ture? — There was a dead silence. — I said 
calmly, I shall henceforth consider any inter- 
ruption by a pun as a hint to change my board- 
ing-house. Do not plead my example. If / 
have used any such, it has been only as a Spar- 
tan father wou.ld show up a drunken helot. We 
have done with them. 

If a logical mind ever found out any- 
thing with its logic ? — I should say that its most 
frequent work was to build a pons asinorum 
over chasms that shrewd people can bestride 
without such a structure. You can hire logic, in 
the shape of a lawyer, to prove anything that 
you want to prove. You can buy treatises to 
show that N"apoleon never lived, and that no 
battle of Bunker-hill was ever fought. The 
great minds are those with a wide span, that 
couple truths related to, but far removed from, 
each other. Ijogicians carry the surveyor's 
chain over the track of which these are the 
true explorers. I value a man mainly for his 
primary relations v,dth truth, as I understand 
truth, — for not any s?coi:dary artifice in hand- 
ling his ideas. Some of the sharpest men in 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 1$ 

argument are notoriously unsound in judg* 
ment. I should not trust the counsel of a 
smart debater any more than that of a good 
chess-player. Either may of course advise 
wisely, but not necessarily because he wrangles 
or plays well. 

The old gentleman who sits opposite got his 
hand up, as a pointer lifts his forefoot, at the 
expression, " his relations with truth as I un- 
derstand truth/' and when I had done, sniffed 
audibly, and said I talked like a transcenden- 
talist. For his part, common sense was good 
enough for him. 

Precisely so, my dear sir, I replied; common 
sense, as you understand it. We all have to as- 
sume a standard of judgment in our own 
minds, either of things or persons. A man 
who is willing to take another's opinion has to 
exercise his judgment in the choice of whom 
to follow, which is often as nice a matter as to 
judge of things for one's self. On the whole, I 
had rather judge men's minds by comparing 
their thoughts with my own, than judge of 
thoughts by knowing who utter them. I must 
do one or the other. It does not follow, of 
course, that I may not recognize another man's 
tlioughts as broader and deeper than my own; 
but that does not necessarily change my opin- 
ion, otherwise this would be at the mercy of 
every superior mind that held a different one. 
How many of our most cherished beliefs are 
like those drinking-glasses of the ancient m.t- 
torn, that serve us well so long as we keep them 
ill our hn.nfl, but spill all if we attempt to set 
them down! I have sometimes compared co^' 



It THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

versation to the Italian game of mora, in which 
one plaj^er lifts his hand with so many fingers 
extended, and the other matches or misses the 
number, as the case may be, with his own. I 
show my thought, another his; if they agree, 
well; if they differ, we find the largest com- 
mon factor, if we can, but at any rate avoid dis- 
puting about remainders and fractions, which 
is to real talk what tuning an instrument is to 
pla}^ng on it. 

What if, instead of talking this morn- 
ing, I should read you a copy of verses, with 
eritical remarks by the author? Any of the 
company can retire that like. 

When Eve had led her lord away, 

And Cain had killed his brother, 
The stars and flowers, the poets say, 

Agreed with one another 

To cheat the cunning- tempter's art, 

And teach the race its diit3% 
By keeping on its wicked heart 

Their eyes of light and beauty. 

A million sleepless lids, they say, 

Will be at least a warning; 
And so the flowers would watch by day. 

The stars from eve to morning-. 

On hill and prairie, field and lawn, 

Their dewy eyes upturning. 
The flowers still watch from reddening dawn 

Till western skies are burning. 

Alas! each hour of daylight tells 

A tale of shame so crushing. 
That some turn white as sea-bleached shells. 

And some are always blushing. 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 17 

But when the patient stars look down 

On all their light discovers, 
The traitor's smile, the murderer's frown, 

The lips of lying- lovers, 

They try to shut their saddening eyes, 

And in the vain endeavor 
We see them twinkling- in the skies, 

And so they wink forever. 

What do you think of these verses, my 
friends? — Is that piece an impromptu? said my 
landlady's daughter. {Mi. 19 -j-. Tender- 
eyed blonde. Long ringlets. Cameo pin. 
Gold pencil-case on a chain. Locket. Brace- 
let. Album. Autograph book. Accordeon. 
Eeads Byron, Tupper, and Sylvanus Cobb, 
junior, while her mother makes the puddings, 
Sa3^s, "Yes?" when you tell her anything.)— 
Qui et no7i, ma petite, — Yes and no, my child. 
Five of the seven verses were written off-hand: 
the other two took a week, — that is, were hang- 
ing round the desk in a ragged, forlorn, un- 
rhymed condition as long as that. All poets 
will tell you just such stories. C'est le deexiek 
pas qui coute. Don't you know how hard it is 
for some people to get out of a room after their 
visit is really over? They want to be off, and 
you want to have them off, but they don't know 
how to manage it. One would think they had 
been built in your parlor or study, and were 
waiting to be launched. I have contrived a 
sort of ceremonial incline plane for such visit- 
ors, which being lubricated with certain smooth 
phrases, I back them down, metaphorically 
speaking, stern foremost, into their "' native 
element," the great ocean of out-doors. Well, 



18 THE AUTOCEAT OF THE 

now, there are poems as hard to get rid of as 
these rural visitors. They come in ghbly, use up 
all the serviceable rhymes, day, ray, beauty, duty, 
skies, eyes, other, brother, mountain, fountain, 
and the like; and so they go on until you think 
it is time for the wind-up, and the wind-up 
won't come on any terms. So they lie about 
until you get sick of the sight of them, and end 
by thrusting some cold scrap of a final couplet 
upon them, and turning them out of doors. I 
suspect a good many " impromptus " could tell 
just such a story as the above. — Here, turning 
to our landlady, I used an illustration which 
pleased the company much at the time, and has 
since been highly commended. " Madam,'' I 
said, "' you can pour three gills and three-quar- 
ters of honey from that pint jug, if it is full, in 
less than one minute; but, Madam, 3'Ou could 
not empty that last quarter of a gill, though 
you were turned into a marble Hebe, and held 
the vessel upside down for a thousand years.'' 

One gets tired to death of the old, old 
rhymes, such as you see in that copy of verses, 
— which I don't mean to abuse, or to pr;iise 
either. I always feel as if I were a cobbler, put- 
ting new top-leathers to an old pair of boot- 
soles and bodies, when I am fitting sentiments 
to these venerable jingles. 

youth 

morning" 

trutli 

warning'. 

Nine-tenths of the " Juvenile Poems " writ- 
ten spring out of the above musical and sug= 
gestive coincidences. 



Br.ioA:;]-;..;?!- t.ujle. 19 

^^Yes?^' said our landlady's daughter. 

I did not address the following remark to 
her, and I trust, from her limited range of read- 
ing, she will never see it; I said it softly to my 
next neighbor. 

When a young female wears a flat circular 
side-curl, gummed on each temple, — when she 
walks with a male, not arm in arm, hut his arm 
against the hack of hers, — and when she says 
"Yes?" with the note of interrogation, you 
are generally safe in asking her what wages she 
gets, and who the '' feller " was you saw her 
with. 

"What were you whispering?" said the 
daughter of the house, moistening her lips, as 
she spoke, in a very engaging manner. 

" I was only giving some hints on the fine 
arts." 

"Yes?" 

It is curious to see how the same wants 

and tastes find the same implements anri modes 
of expression in all times and places. The 
young ladies of Otaheite, as you may see in 
Cook's Voyages, had a sort of crinoline ar- 
rangement fully equal in radius to the largest 
spread of our own lady-baskets. When I fling 
a Bay-State shawd over my shoulders, I am 
only taking a lesson from the climate that the 
Indian had learned before me. A hlanket- 
shawl we call it, and not a plaid; and we wear 
it like the aborigines, and not like the High- 
landers. 

We are the Romans of the modern world, 

— the great assimilating people. Conflicts and 
conquests are of course necessary accidents 



20 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

with us, as with our prototypes. And so we 
come to their style of weapon. Our army 
sword is the short, stiff, pointed gladius of the 
Eomans; and the American bowie-knife is the 
same tool, modified to meet the daily wants of 
civilized society. I announce at this table an 
axiom not to be found in Montesquieu or the 
journals of Congress: — 

The race that shortens it weapons lenarthens 
its boundaries. 

Corollary. It was the Polish lance that left 
Poland at last with nothing of her own to 
bound. 

*' Dropped from her nerveless grasp the shatter'ed 
spear! " 

What business had Sarmatia to be fighting 
for liberty with a fifteen-foot pole between her 
and the breasts of her enemies? If she had but 
clutched the old Eoman and young American 
weapon, and come to close quarters, there 
might have been a chance for her: but it would 
have spoiled the best passage in " The Pleas- 
ures of Hope." 

Self-made men? — Well, yes. Of course 

everybody likes and respects self-made men. 
It is a great deal better to be made in that way 
than not to be made at all. Are any of you 
younger people old enough to remember that 
Irishman's house on the marsh at Cambridge- 
port, which house he built from drain to chim- 
ney-top with his own hands? It took him a 
good maiiy years to build it, and one could see 
that it was a little out of plumb, and a little 
wavy in outline, and a little queer and uncer- 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 21 

tain in general aspect. A regular hand could 
certainly have built a better house; but it was 
a very good house for a "self-made" carpen- 
ter's house, and people praised it, and said how 
remarkably well the Irishman had succeeded. 
They never thought of praising the fine blocks 
of houses a little further on. 

Your self-made man, whittled into shape 
with his own jack-knife, deserves more credit, 
if that is all, than the regular engine-turned 
article, shapped by the most approved pattern, 
and French-polished by society and travel 
But as to saying that one is every way the equal 
of the other"^ that is another matter. The right 
of strict social discrimination of all things and 
persons, according to their merits, native or 
acquired, is one of the most precious republi- 
can privileges. I take the liberty to exercise it, 
when I say, that, other tilings being equal, in 
most relations of hfe I prefer a man of family. 

What do I mean by a man of family? — 0, 
I'll give you a general idea of what I mean. 
Let us give him a hrst-rate fit out; it costs iis 
nothing. 

Four or five generations of gentlemen and 
gentlewomen — among them a member of His 
Majesty's Council for the Province, a Governor 
or so, one or two Doctors of Divinity, a mem- 
ber of Congress, not later than the time of top- 
boots with tassels. 

Family portraits. The member of the Coun- 
cil, by Smibert. The great merchant-uncle, by 
Copley, full length, sitting in his arm-chair, in 
a velvet cap and flowered robe, with a g obo by 
him, to show the range of his cornnierciaj 



J2 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

transactions, and letters with large red seals 
lying round, one directed conspicuously to The 
Honorable, etc., etc. Great-grandmother, by the 
same artist; brown satin, lace very fine, hands 
superlative; grand old lady, stiitish, but impos- 
ing. Her mother, artist unknown; fiat, angu- 
lar, hanging sleeves; parrot on fist. A pair of 
Stuarts, viz., 1. A superb full-blown, medi- 
aeval gentleman, with a fiery dash of Tory 
blood in his veins, tempered down with that of 
a fine old rebel grandmother, and warmed up 
with the best of old India Madeira; his face is 
one flame of ruddy sunshine; his ruffled shirt 
rushes out of his bosom vdth an impetuous 
generosity, as if it would drag his heart after 
it; and his smile is good for twenty thousand 
dollars to the Hospital, besides ample bequests 
to all relatives and dependants. 2. Lady of the 
same; remarkable cap; high waist, as in time of 
Empire; bust a la Josephine; wisps of curls, 
like celery- tips, at sides of forehead; com- 
plexion clear and warm, like rose-cordial. As 
for the miniatures by Malbone, we don't count 
them in the gallery. 

Books, too, with the names of old college- 
students in them, — family names; — you will find 
them at the head of their respective classes in 
the days when students took rank on the 
catalogue from their parents' condition. Elze- 
virs, with the Latinized appellations of youth- 
ful progenitors and Hie liher est metis on the 
title-page. A set of Hogarth's original plates. 
Pope, original edition, 15 volumes, LondoUj 
1717. Barrow on the lower shelves, in folio. 
Tillotson on the upper, in a little dark platoon 
of octodecimos. 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 23 

Some family silver; a string of wedding and 
funeral rings; the arms of the family curiously 
blazoned; the same in worsted, by a maiden 
aunt. 

If the man of family has an old place to keep 
these things in, furnished with claw-foot chairs 
and black mahogany tables, and tall bevel- 
edged mirrors, and stately upright cabinets, 
his outfit is complete. 

No, my friends, I go (always, other things 
being equal) for the man that inherits family 
traditions and the cumulative humanities of at 
least four or five generations. Above all 
things, as a child, he should have tumbled 
about in a library. All men are afraid of books 
that have not handled them from infancy. Do 
you suppose our dear Professor over there ever 
read Poll Synopsis, or consulted Castelli Lexi- 
con, while he v/as growing up to their stature? 
Not he; but virtue passed through the hem of 
their parchment and leather garments when- 
ever he touched them, as the precious drugs 
sweated through the bat's handle in the Ara- 
bian story. I tell you he is at home wherever 
he smells the invigorating fragrance of Russia 
leather. No self-made man feels so. One may, 
it is true, have all the antecedents I have 
spoken of, and yet be a boor or a shabby fel- 
low. One may have none of them, and yet be fit 
for councils and courts. Then let them change 
places. Our social arrangement has this great 
beauty, that its strata shift up and down as 
they change specific gravity, withont being 
clogged by layers of prescription. But I still 
insist on my (3emocratic liberty of choice, and 



24 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

I go for the man with the gallery of family 
portraits against the one with the twenty-five- 
cent daguerreotype, unless I find out that the 
last is the better of the two. 

1 should have felt more nervous about 

the late comet, if I had thought the world was 
ripe. But it is very green yet, if I am not mis- 
taken; and besides, there is a great deal of 
coal to use up, which I cannot bring myself to 
think was made for nothing. If certain things, 
which seem to me essential to a millenium, 
had come to pass, I should have been fright- 
ened; but they haven't. Perhaps you w^ould 
like to hear my 

LATTER-DAY WARNINGS. 

When legislators keep the law, 

When banks dispense with bolts and locks, 
When berries, whortle — rasp — and straw — 

Grow bigger downwards through the box, — ■ 

When he that selleth house or land 
Shows leak in roof or flaw in right, — 

When haberdashers choose the stand 

Whose window hath the broadest light, — 

When preachers tell ns all they think, 
And party leaders all they mean, — 

When what we pay for, that we drink, 
From real grape and coffee-bean, — 

When la\vyers take what they wonld give, 
And doctors give what they would take, — 

When city fathers eat to live. 

Save when they fast for conscience' sake,— 

When one that hath a horse on sale 
Shall bring his merit to the proof. 

Without a lie for every nail 
That holds the iron on the hoof, — 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 25 

V/hen in the usual place for rips 

Our gloves are stitched with special care, 

And guarded well the whalebone tips 
Where first umbrellas need repair, — 

When Cuba's weeds have quite forgot 

The power of suction to resist, 
And claret-bottles harbor not 

Such dimples as would hold your fist, — 

When publishers no longer steal 

And pay for what they stole before, — 

When the first locomotive's wheel 

Rolls through the Hoosac tunnel's bore 

Till then let Gumming blaze away, 
And Miller's saints blow up the globe; 

But when you see that blessed day, 
7^he7i order your ascension robe! 

The company seemed to like the verses, and 
I promised them to read others occasionally, if 
they had a mind to hear them. Of course they 
would not expect it every morning. Neither 
must the reader suppose that all these things I 
have reported were said at any one breakfast 
time. I have not taken the trouble to date 
them, as Easpail, pere, used to date every proof 
he sent to the printer; but they were scattered 
over several breakfasts; and I have said a good 
many more things since which I shall very pos- 
sibly print some time or other, if I am urged to 
do it by judicious friends. 



II. 

I REALLY believe some people save their 
bright thoughts as being too precious for conver- 
sation. What do you think an admiring friend 



26 THE AUTOCKAT OF THE 

said the other day to one that was talking good 
things, — good enough to print ? " Why/^ said 
he, '* you are wasting merchantable literature, 
a cash article, at the rate, as nearly as 1 can 
tell, of fifty dollars an hour.'' The talker took 
him to the window, and asked him to look out 
and tell what he saw. 

" Nothing but a very dusty street," he said, 
" and a man driving a sprinkling machine 
through it." 

" Why don't you tell the man he is .wasting, 
that water? What would be the state of the 
highways of life if we did not drive our thought-- 
sprinMers through them with the valves open 
sometimes? 

" Besides, there is another thing about this 
talking, which you forget. It shapes our 
thoughts for us; — the waves of conversation 
roll them as the surf rolls the pebbles on the 
shore. Let me modify the image a little. I 
rough out my thoughts in talk as an artist 
models in clay. Spoken language is so plastic,, 
— you can pat and coax, and spread and shave, 
and rub out, and fill up, and stick on so easily, 
when you work that soft material, that there 
is nothing like it for modeling. Out of it come 
the shapes which you turn into marble or 
bronze in your immortal books, if you happen 
to wTite such. Or, to use another illustration, 
writing or printing is like shooting with a rifle; 
you may hit your reader's mind, or miss it; — 
but talking is like playing at a mark with the 
pipe of an engine; if it is within reach, and 
vou have time enough, you can't help hit- 
ting it." 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 27 

The company agreed that this last illustra- 
tion was of superior excellence, or, in the 
phrase used by them, " Fust-rate/' I acknowl- 
edged the compliment, but gently rebuked the 
expression. " Fust-rate," " prime,'' " a prime 
article," " a superior piece of goods," " a hand- 
some garment," " a gent in a flowered vest," — 
all such expressions are final. They blast the 
lineage of him or her who utters them, for 
generations up and down. There is one other 
phrase which will soon come to be decisive of 
a man's social status, if it is not already: " That 
tells the whole story." It is an expression 
which vulgar and conceited people particularly 
affect, and which well-meaning ones, who know 
better, catch from them. It is intended to stop 
all debate, like the previous question in the 
General Court. Only it don't; simply because 
•* that " does not usually tell the whole, nor 
one-half of the whole story. 

It is an odd idea, that almost all our 

people have had a professional education. To 
become a doctor a man must study some three 
years and hear a thousand lectures, more or 
less. Just how much study it takes to make a 
lawyer I cannot say, but probably not more 
than this. Now most decent people hear one 
hundred lectures or sermons (discourses) on 
theology every year, — and tMs, twenty, thirty, 
fifty years together. They read a great many 
religious books besides. The clergy, however, 
raroiv hear any sermons except v'bn+ f-ev 
preach themselves. A dull preacher miVh^ be 
conceived, therefore, to lapse into a stn+o of 
quasi heathenism, simply for want of relifrious 



iio THE AUIOCIIAT OF THE 

instruction. And on the other hand^ an atten- 
tive and intelligent hearer, listening to a suc- 
cession of wise teachers, might become actu- 
ally better educated in theolog}^ than any one 
of them. We are all theological students, and 
more of us qualified as doctors of divinity than 
have received degrees at any of the universi- 
ties. 

It is not strange, therefore, that very good 
people should often find it difficult, if not im- 
possible, to keep their attention fixed upon a 
sermon treating feebly a subject which they 
have thought vigorously about for years, and 
heard able men discuss scores of times. I 
have often noticed, however, that a hopelessly 
dull discourse acts inductively, as electricians 
would say, in developing strong mental cur- 
rents. I am ashamed to think with what ac- 
companiments and variations and fiorilure I 
have sometimes followed the droning of a 
heavy speaker, — not willingly, — for my habit 
is reverential, — but as a necessary result of a 
slight continuous impression on the senses and 
the mind, which kept both in action without 
furnishing the food they required to work 
upon. If you ever saw a crow with a king- 
bird after him, you will get an image of a dull 
S))caker and a lively listener. The bird in sable 
plumage flaps heavily along his straight-for- 
ward course, while the other sails round him, 
over him, under him, leaves him, comes back 
again, tweaks out a black feather, shoots away 
once more, never losing sight of him, and 
fiufilly reaches the crow's perch at the some 
titae the crow does, having cut a perfect laby- 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 29 

rinth of loops and knots and spirals while the 
slow fowl was painfully working from one end 
of ]us straight line to the other. 

[I think these remarks were received rather 
coolly. A temporary boarder from the coun- 
try, consisting of a somewhat more than 
middle-aged female, with a parchment fore- 
head and a dry little " f risette " shingling it, a 
sallow neck with a necklace of gold beads, a 
black dress too rusty for recent grief, and con- 
tours in basso-relievo, left the table prema- 
turely, and was reported to have been very viru- 
lent about what 1 said. So I went to my good 
old minister, and repeated the remarks, as 
nearly as I could remember them, to him. He 
lauo'hed good-naturedly, and said there was 
considerable truth in them. He thought he 
could tell when people's minds were wander- 
ing, by their looks. In the earlier years of his 
ministry he had sometimes noticed this, when 
he was preaching; — very little of late years. 
Sometimes, when his colleague was preaching, 
he observed this kind of inattention; but after 
all, it was not so very unnatural. I will say, 
by the way, that it is a rule I have long fol- 
lowed, to tell my worst thoughts to my minis- 
ter, and my best thoughts to the young people 
I talk with.] 

1 want to make a literary confession now, 

wliich I believe nobody has made before me. 
You knoAv very well that I write verses some- 
times, because I have read some of them at this 
tan!(\ (The company as^^eiited, — two or three 
of them in a resigned sort of way, as I thought, 
as if they supposed I had an epic in my pocket. 



30 THE AUTOCEAT OF THE 

and was going to read half a dozen books or so 
for their benefit.) — I continued. Of course I 
write some lines or passages which are better 
than others; some which, comj)ared with the 
others, might be called relatively excellent. It 
is in the nature of things that I should con- 
sider these relatively excellent lines or passages 
as absolutely good. So much must be par- 
doned to humanity. Now I never wrote a 
" good " line in my life, but the moment after 
it was written it seemed a hundred years old. 
Very comm.only I had a sudden conviction that 
I had seen it somewhere. Possibly I may have 
sometimes unconsciously stolen it, but I do not 
remember that I ever once detected any his- 
torical truth in these sudden convictions of the 
antiquity of my new thought or phrase. I 
have learned utterly to distrust them, and 
never allow them to bully me out of a thought 
or line. 

This is the philosophy of it. (Here the 
number of the company w^as diminished by a 
small secession.) Any new formula which 
suddenly emerges in our consciousness has its 
roots in long trains of thought; it is virtually 
old when it first makes its appearance among 
the recognized growths of our intellect. Any 
crystalline group of musical words has had a 
long and still period to form in. Here is one 
theory. 

But there is a larger law which perhaps com- 
prehends these facts. It is this. The rapidity 
with which ideas grow old in our memories is 
in a direct ratio to the squares of their impor- 
tance. Their apparent age runs np miracu- 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 31 

lously, like the value of diamonds, as they 
increase in magnitude. A great calamity, for 
instance, is as old as the trilobites an hour after 
it has happened. It stains backward through 
all the leaves we have turned over in the book 
of life, before its blot of tears or of blood, is dry 
on the page we are turning. For this we seem 
to have lived; it was foreshadowed in dreams 
that we leaped out of in the cold sweat of 
terror; in the " dissolving views " of dark day- 
visions; all omens pointed to it; all paths led 
to it. After the tossing half-forgetfulness of 
the first sleep that follows such an event, it 
comes upon us afresh, as a surprise, at waking; 
in a few moments it is old again, — old as 
eternity. 

[I wish I had not said all this then and 
there. I might have known better. The pale 
schoolmistress, in her mourning dress, was 
looking at me, as I noticed, with a wild sort of 
expression. All at once the blood dropped out 
of her cheeks as the mercury drops from a 
broken barometer-tube, and she melted away 
from her seat like an image of snow; a slung- 
shot could not have brought her down better. 
God forgive me! 

After this little episode, I continued, to some 
few that remained balancing teaspoons on the 
edges of cups, twirling knives, or tilting upon 
the hind legs of their chairs until their heads 
reached the wall, where they left gratuitous 
advertisements of various popular cosm^etics.] 

When a person is suddenly thrust into any 
strancre. new i^.npition of trial, lie fiufls tlte place 
fits him as if he had been measured for it. He 



^2 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

has committed a great crime, for instance, and 
is sent to the State Prison. The traditions, 
prescriptions, Hmitations, privileges, all the 
sharp conditions of his new life, stamp them- 
selves npon his consciousness as the signet on 
soft wax; — a single pressure is enough. Let 
me strengthen the image a little. Did you ever 
happen to see that most soft-spoken and velvet- 
handed steam-engine at the Mint? The 
smooth piston slides backward and forward as 
a lady might slip her delicate finger in and out 
of a ring. The engine lays one of its fingers 
calmly, but firmly, upon a bit of metal; it is a 
coin now, and will remember that touch, and 
tell a new race about it, when the date upon it 
is crusted over with twenty centuries. So it is 
that a great silent-moving misery puts a new 
stamp on us in an hour or a moment, — as sharp 
an impression as if it had taken half a lifetime 
to engrave it. 

It is awful to be in the hands of the whole- 
sale professional dealers in misfortune; under- 
takers and jailers magnetize you in a moment, 
and you pass out of the individual life you 
were living into the rhythmical movements of 
their horrible machinery. Do the worst thing 
you can, or suffer the worst that can be 
thought of, you find yourself in a category of 
humanity that stretches back as far as Cain, 
and with an expert at your elbow that has 
studied your case all out beforehand, and is 
waiting for you with his implements of hemp 
or maliofrany. I believe, if a man were to be 
burned in any of our citios to-morrow for 
heresy, there would be found a master of cere- 



BREAKFAST TABLE. ^^ 

monies that knew just how many fagots were 
necessary, and the best way of arranging the 
whole matter. 

So we have not won the Goodwood cup; 

au contraire, we were a " bad fifth/' if not 
worse than that; and trying it again, and the 
third time, has not yet bettered the matter. 
Now I am as patriotic as any of my fellow- 
citizens, — too patriotic in fact, for I have got 
into hot water by loving too much of my coun- 
try; in short, if any man, whose fighting 
weight is not more than eight stone four 
pounds, disputes it, I am ready to discuss the 
point with him. I should have gloried to see 
the stars and stripes in front at the finish. I 
love my country, and I love horses. Stubbs's 
old mezzotint of Echpse hangs over my desk^ 
and Herring's portrait of Plenipotentiary,— 
whom I saw run at Epsom, — over my fireplace. 
Did I not elope from school to see Eevenge^ 
and Prospect, and Little John, and Peace- 
maker run over the race-course where now yon 
suburban village flourishes, in the year 
eighteen hundred and ever-so-few? Though 
I never owned a horse, have I not been the pro- 
prietor of six equine females, of which one was 
the prettiest little " Morgin " that ever 
stepped? Listen, then, to an opinion I have 
often expressed long before this venture of ours 
in England. Horse-mctn^ is not a republican 
institution; hovse-trotting is. Only very rich 
persons can keep race-horses, and everybody 
knows they are kept mainly as gambling imple- 
ments. All that matter about blood and speed 
we won't discuss; we understand all that; use- 



34 THE AUTOCEAT OF THE 

iul, very, — of course, — great obligations to the 
Godolphin "Arabian,'^ and the rest. I say 
racing horses are essentially gambling imple- 
ments, as much as roulette tables. Now I am 
not preaching at this moment; I may read you 
one of my sermons some other morning; but I 
maintain that gambling, on the great scale, is 
not republican. It belongs to two phases of 
society, — a cankered over-civilization, such as 
exists in rich aristocracies, and the reckless life 
of borderers and adventurers, or the semi-bar- 
barisjn of a civilization resolved into its primi- 
tive elements. Eeal republicanism is stern and 
severe; its essence is not in forms of govern- 
ment, but in the omnipotence of public opinion 
which grows out of it. This public opinion 
cannot prevent gambling with dice or stocks, 
but it can and does compel it to keep compara- 
tively quiet. But horse-racing is the most 
public way of gambling; and with all its 
immense attractions to the sense and the feel- 
ings, — to which I plead very susceptible, — ^the 
disguise is too thin that covers it, and every- 
body knows what it means. Its supporters are 
the Southern gentry, — fine fellows, no doubt, 
but not republicans exactly, as we understand 
the term, — a few Northern millionaires more, or 
less thoroughly millioned, who do not represent 
the real people, and the mob of sporting men, 
the best of whom are commonly idlers, and the 
worst very bad neighbors to have near one in a 
o»©wd, or to meet in a dark alley. In England, 
-on the other hand, with its aristocratic institu- 
tions, racing is a natural growth enough; the 
passion for it spreads downward through all 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 35^^ 

classes, from the Queen to the costermonger. 
London is like a shelled corn-cob on the Derby 
day, and there is not a clerk who could raise 
the money to hire a saddle with an old hack 
under it that can sit down on his office-stool 
the next day without wincing. 

Now just compare the racer with the trotter 
for a moment. The racer is incidentally use- 
ful, but essentially something to bet upon, as 
much as the thimble-rigger's " little joker." 
The trotter is essentially and daily useful, and 
only incidentally a tool for sporting men. 

What better reason do you want for the fact 
that the racer is most cultivated and reaches his 
greatest perfection in England, and that the 
trotting horses of America beat the world? 
And why should we have expected that the 
pick — if it was the pick — of our few and far 
between racing stables should beat the pick of 
England and France? Throw over the fal- 
lacious time-test, and there was nothing to show 
for it but a natural kind of patriotic feeling, 
which we all have, with a thoroughly provincial 
conceit, which some of us must plead guilty to. 

We may beat yet. As an American, I hope 
we shall. As a moralist and occasional sermon- 
izer, I am not so anxious about it. Wherever 
the trotting horse goes, he carries in his train 
brisk omnibuses, lively bakers' carts, and there- 
fore hot rolls, the jolly butcher's wagon, the 
cheerful gig, the wholesome afternoon drive 
with wife and child, — all the forms of moral 
excellence, except truth, which does not ac^ree 
with any kind of horse-flesh. The racer brings 
with him gambling, cursing, swearing, drink- 



^6 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

ing, the eating of oysters^ and a distaste for 
mob-caps and the middle-aged virtues. 

And by the way, let me beg you not to call a 
trotting match a race, and not to speak of a 
" thoroughbred " as a " blooded " horse, unless 
he has been recently phlebotomized. I consent 
to your saying " blood horse," if you like. 
Also, if, next year, we send out Posterior and 
Posterioress, the winners of the great national 
four mile-race in 7:18 J, and they happen to get 
beaten, pay your bets, and behave like men and 
gentlemen about it, if you know how. 

[I felt a great deal better after blowing off 
the ill-temper condensed in the above para- 
graph. To brag little, — to show well, — to crow 
gently, if in luck, — to pay up, to own up, and 
to shut up, if beaten, are the virtues of a sport- 
ing man, and I can't say that I think we have 
shown them in any great perfection of late.] 

Apropos of horses. Do you know how 

important good jockeying is to authors? Judi- 
cious management; letting the public see your 
animal just enough, and not too much; hold- 
ing him up hard when the market is too full of 
him; letting him out at just the right buying 
intervals; always gently feeling his mouth; 
never slacking and never jerking the rein; — 
this is what I mean by jockeying. 

When an author has a number of books 

out, a cunning hand will keep them all spin- 
ning, as Signor Blitz does his dinner-plates; 
fetching each one up, as it begins to " wabble," 
by an advertisement, a puff, or a quotation. 

Whenever the extracts from a living 

writer begin to multiply fast in the papers. 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 3T 

without obvious reason^ there is a new book or 
a new edition coming. The extracts are 
(/round-hait. 

Literary life is full of curious phe- 
nomena. I don't know that there is anything 
more noticeable than what we may call con- 
ventional reputatio7is. There is a tacit under- 
standing in every community of men of letters 
that they will not disturb the popular fallacy 
respecting this or that electro-gilded celebrity. 
There are various reasons for this forbearance: 
one is old; one is rich; one is good-natured; one 
is such a favorite with the pit that it would not 
be safe to hiss him from the manager's box. 
The venerable augurs of the literary or scien- 
tific temple may smile faintly when one of the 
tribe is mentioned; but the farce is in general 
kept up as well as the Chinese comic scene of en- 
treating and imploring a man to stay with you, 
with the implied compact between you that he 
shall by no means think of doing it. A poor 
wretch he must be who would wantonly sit down 
on one of these band-box reputations. A Prince- 
Eupert's-drop, which is a tear of unannealed 
glass, lasts indefinitely, if you keep it from med- 
dling hands; but break its tail off, and it ex- 
plodes and resolves itself into powder. These 
celebrities I speak of are the Prince-iiupert's- 
drops of the learned and polite world. See how 
the papers treat them! What an array of pleas- 
ant kaleidoscopic phrases, that can be arranged 
in ever so many charming patterns, is at their 
service! How kind the "Critical Xotices " — ^ 
where small authorship comes to pick up chips 
of praise, fragrant, sugary, and sappy — always 



68 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

-are to them! "Well, life would be nothing with- 
out paper credit and other fictions; so let them 
pass current. Don^t steal their chips; don't 
puncture their swimming bladders; don't come 
down on their pasteboard boxes; don't break 
the ends of their brittle and unstable reputa- 
tions, YOU fellows who all feel sure that your 
names will be household words a thousand years 
from now. 

" A thousand years is a good while," said the 
old gentleman who sits opposite, thoughtfully. 

Where have I been for the last three or 

four days? DoM^n at the Island, deer-shooting. 
— How many did I bag? I brought home one 
buck shot. — The Island is where? No matter. 
It is the most splendid domain that any man 
looks upon in these latitudes. Blue sea around 
it, and running up into its heart, so that the 
little boat slumbers like a baby in lap, while the 
iall ships are stripping naked to fight the hur- 
ricane outside, and storm-stay-sails banging 
and flying in ribbons. Trees, in stretches of 
miles; beeches, oaks, most numerous; — many of 
them hung with moss, looking like bearded 
Druids; some coiled in the clasp of huge, dark- 
stemmed grape-vines. Open patches where the 
sun gets in and goes to sleep, and the winds 
come so finely sifted that they are as soft as 
swan's down. Eocks scattered about, — Stone-, 
henge-like monoliths. Fresh-water lakes; one 
-of them, Mary's Lake, crystal clear, full of flash- 
ing pickerel lying under the lily pads like tigers 
iin the jungle. Six pounds of ditto one morn- 
ing for breakfast. Ego fecit. 

The divinity-student looked as if he would 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 39 

like to question my Latin. No, sir, I said, — you 
aeed not trouble yourself. There is a higher 
law in grammar, not to he put down by An- 
drews and Stoddard. Then I went on. 

Such hospitality as that island has seen there 
has not been the like of in these our New Eng- 
land sovereignties. There is nothing in the 
shape of kindness and courtesy that can make 
life beautiful, which has not found its home in 
that ocean-principality. It has welcomed all 
who were worthy of welcome, from the pale 
clergyman who came to breathe the sea-air, 
with its medicinal salt and iodine, to the great 
statesman who turned his back on the affairs of 
empire, and smoothed his Olympian forehead, 
and flashed his white teeth in merriment over 
the long table, where his wit was the keenest 
and his story the best. 

[I don't believe any man ever talked like 
that in this world. I don't believe I talked just 
so; but the fact is, in reporting one's conversa- 
tion, one cannot help Blair-mg it up more or 
less, ironing out crumpled paragraphs, starch- 
ing limp ones, and crimping and plaiting a 
little sometimes; it is as natural as prinking at 
the looking-glass.] 

How can a man help writing poetry in 

such a place? Everybody does write poetry 
that goes there. In the state archives, kept in 
the library of the Lord of the Isle, are whole 
volumes of unpublished verse, — some by well- 
known hands, and others, quite as good, by the 
last people you would think of as versifiers, — 
men who could pension off all the genuine 
poets in the country, and buy ten acres of Bos- 



40 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

ton Common, if it was for sale, with what they 
had left. Of course, I had to write my little 
copy of verses with the rest; here it is, if you 
will hear me read it. When the sun is in the 
west, vessels sailing in an easterly direction 
look bright or dark to one who observes them 
from the north or south, according to the tack 
they are sailing upon. Watching them from 
one of the windows of the great mansion I saw 
these perpetual changes, and moralized thus: 

As I look from the isle, o'er its billows of green 

To the billows of foam-crested blue, 
Yon bark, that afar in the distance is seen, 

Half dreaming-, my eyes will pursue: 
Now dark in the shadow, she scatters the spray 

As the chaff in the stroke of the flail; 
Now white as the sea-gull, she flies on her way 

The sun gleaming bright on her sail. 

Yet her pilot is thinking of dangers to shun, — 

Of breakers that whiten and roar; 
How little he cares, if in shadow or sun 

They see him that gaze from the shore! 
He looks to the beacon that looms from the reef^ 

To the rock that is under his lee, 
As he drifts on the blast, like a wind-wafted leaf. 

O'er the gulfs of the desolate sea. 

Thus drifting afar to the dim-vaulted caves 

Where life and its ventures are laid, 
The dreamers who gaze while we battle the waves 

]'\ray see us in sunshine or shade; 
Yeo true to our course, though our shadow grow 
dnrk. 

We'll trim our broad -sail as before, 
And stand by the rudder that governs the bark. 

Nor ask how we look from the shore! 

Insanity is often the loo^ic of an accu- 



rate mind overtasked. Good mental machin- 



BREAKFAST TABLE, 41 

ery ought to break its own wheels and levers, 
if anything is thrust among them suddenly 
which tends to stop them or reverse their mo- 
tion. A weak mind does not accumulate force 
enough to hurt itself; stupidity often saves a 
man from going mad. We frequently see per- 
sons in insane hospitals, sent there in conse- 
quence of what are called religious mental dis- 
turbances. I confess that I think better of 
them than of many who hold the same notions, 
and keep their wits and appear to enjoy life 
very well, outside of the asylums. Any decent 
person ought to go mad if he really holds such 
or such opinions. It is very much to his dis- 
credit, in every point of view, if he does not. 
What is the use of my saying what some of 
these opinions are? Perhaps more than one of 
you hold such as I should think ought to send 
you straight over to Somerville, if you have any 
logic in your heads or any human feeling in 
your hearts. Anything that is brutal, cruel, 
heathenish, that makes life hopeless for the 
most of mankind and perhaps for entire races, 
— anything that assumes the necessity of the 
extermination of instincts which were given to 
be regulated, — no matter by what name you 
call it, — no matter whether a fakir, or a monk, 
or a deacon believes it, — if received, ought to 
produce insanity in every well-regulated mind. 
That condition becomes a normal one, under 
the circumstances. I am very much ashamed 
of pome people for retaining their reason, when 
they know perfectly well that if they were not 
the most stupid or the most selfish of human be- 
ings, they would become noncompotes at once. 



42 THE AUTOCKAT OF THE 

[Nobody understood this but the theological 
student and the schoolmistress. They looked 
intelligently at each other; but whether they 
were thinking about my paradox or not, 1 am 
not clear. — It would be natural enough. 
Stranger things have happened. Love and 
Death enter boarding-houses without asking 
the price of board, or whether there is room for 
them. Alas, these young people are poor and 
pallid. Love sJiouId be both rich and rosy, but 
must be either rich or rosy. Talk about mili- 
tary duty! What is that to the warfare of a 
married maid-of-all-work, with the title of mis- 
tress, and an American female constitution^ 
which collapses just in the middle third of life, 
and comes out vulcanized India-rubber, if it 
happen to live through the period when health 
and strength are most wanted?] 

Have I ever acted in private theatricals? 

Often. I have played the part of the " Poor 
Gentleman," before a great many audiences, — • 
more, I trust, than I shall ever face again. I 
did not wear a stage costume, nor a wig, nor 
mustaches of burnt cork; but I was placarded 
and announced as a public performer, and at 
the proper hour I came forward with the ballet- 
dancer's smile upon my countenance, and made 
my bow and acted my part. I have seen my 
name stuck up in letters so big that I was 
ashamed to show myself in the place by day- 
light. I have gone to a town with a sober liter- 
ary essay in my pocket, and seen myself every- 
where announced as the most desperate of 
huff OS, — one who was obliged to restrain iiiniself 
in the full exercise of his powers, from pruden- 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 43 

tial considerations. I have been through as 
man}^ hardships as Ulysses, in the pursuit of my 
histrionic vocation. I have traveled in cars un- 
til the conductors all knew me like a brother. I 
have run off the rails, and stuck all night in 
snow-drifts, and sat behind females that would 
have the window open when one could not 
wink without his eyelids freezing together. 
Perhaps I shall give you some of my experiences 
one of these days; — I will not now, for I have 
something else for you. 

Private theatricals, as I have figured in them 
in country lyceum halls, are one thing, — and 
private theatricals, as they may be seen in cer- 
tain gilded and frescoed saloons of our me- 
tropolis, are another. Yes, it is pleasant to see 
real gentlemen and ladies, who do not think it 
necessary to mouth, and rant, and stride, like 
most of our stage heroes and heroines, in the 
characters which show off their graces and tal- 
ents; most of all to see a fresh, unrouged, un- 
spoiled, high-bred young maiden, v/ith a lithe 
figure, and a pleasant voice, acting in those 
love-dramas that make us young again to look 
upon, when real youth and beauty will play 
them for us. 

Of course I wrote the prologue I was 

asked to write. I did not see the play, though. 
I knew there was a young lady in it, and that 
somebody was in love with her, and she was in 
love with him, and somebody (an old tutor, I 
believe) wanted to interfere, and, very natur- 
ally, the yonusf lady was too sharp for him. 
The play of course ends charmingly; there is 
a geueral reconciliation, and ail concerned form 



44 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

a line and take each others' hands, as people 
always do after they have made up their quar- 
rels, — and then the curtain falls, — if it does not 
stick, as it commonly does at private theatrical 
exhihitions, in which case a boy is detailed to 
pull it down, which he does, blushing violently. 
Now, then, for my prologue. I am not going 
to change my cassuras and cadences for any- 
body; so if you do not like the heroic, or iambic 
trimeter brachy catalectic, you had better not 
wait to hear it. 

THIS IS IT. 

A Prologue? Well, of course the ladies know; 
I have my doubts. No matter, — here we go\ 
What is a Prologfue? Let our Tutor teach: 
Pro means beforehand; logos stands for speech. 
'Tis like the harper's prelude on the strings, 
The prima donna's courtesy ere she sings; — 
Prologues in meter are to other pros 
As worsted stockings are to engine-hose. 

" The world's a stage," — as Shakespeare said, on« 

day; 
The stage a world — was what he meant to say. 
The outside world's a blunder, that is clear; 
The real world that Nature meant is here. 
Here every foundling finds its lost mamma; 
Each rogue, repentant, melts his stern i^apa; 
Misers relent, the spendthrift's debts are paid. 
The cheats are taken in the traps they laid; 
One after one the troubles all are past 
Till the fifth act comes right side up at last. 
When the young couple, old folks, rogues, and all. 
Join hands, so happy at the curtain's fall. 
— Here suflPering virtue ever finds relief. 
And black-browed ruffians always come to grief. 
— When the lorn damsel, with a frantic screech, 
And cheeks as hueless as a brandy-peach. 
Cries, "Help, kyind Heaven!" and drops upon 

her knees 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 45 

On the green — baize, — beneath the (canvas) 

trees, — 
See to her side avenging- Valor fly: — 
"Ha! Villain! Draw! Now, Terraitorr, yield or 

die! " 
— When the ])oot hero flounders in despair, 
Some dear lost uncle turns up millionaire, — 
Clasps the young scapegrace with paternal joy, 
Sobs on his neck, ''My boy I My boy!! MY 

BOY!!! " 

Ours, then, sweet friends, the real world to-night 
Of love that conquers in disaster's spite. 
Ladies, attend! While woeful cares and doubt 
Wrong the soft passion in the world without. 
Though fortune scowl, though prudence interfere, 
One thing is certain: Love will triumj)h here! 

Lords of creation, whom your ladies rule, — 
The world's great masters, when you're out of 

school, — 
Learn the brief moral of our evening's play: 
Man has his will, — but woman has her way! 
While man's dull spirit toils in smoke and fire. 
Woman's swift instinct threads the electric 

wire, — 
The magic bracelet stretched beneath the waves 
Beats the black giant with his score of slaves. 
All earthly powers confess your sovereign art 
But that one rebel, — woman's willful heart. 
All foes you master; but a woman's wit 
Lets daylight through you ere you know you're 

hit. 
So, just to picture what her art can do. 
Hear an old story made as good as new. 

Kudolph, professor of the headsman's trade, 
Alike was famous for his arm and blade. 
One day a prisoner Justice had to kill 
Knelt at the block to test the artist's skill. 
Bare-armed, swart-visaged, gaunt, and shaggy 

brovred, 
Rudolph the headsman rose above the crowd. 



46 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

His falchion lightened with a sudden gleam. 

As the pike's armor flashes in the stream. 

He sheathed his blade; he turned as if to go; 

The victim knelt, still waiting for the blow. 

" Why strikest not? Perform thy murderous 

act," 
The prisoner said. (His voice was slightly 

cracked.) 
" Friend, I have struck," the artist straight 

replied; 
" Wait but one moment, and yourself decide." 
He held his snuff-box, — " Now then, if you 

please! " 
The prisoner sniffed, and, with a crashing sneeze, 
Ofl: his head tumbled, — bowled along the floor, — 
Bounced down the steps; — the prisoner said no 

more! 

Woman! thy falchion is a glittering eye; 
If death lurks in it, oh, how sweet to die! 
Thou takest hearts as Rudolph took the head; 
We die with love, and never dream we're dead! 

The prologue went off very well, as I hear. 
No alterations were suggested by the lady to 
whom it was sent, so far as I know. Sometimes 
people criticise the poems one sends them, and 
suggest all sorts of improvements. Who was 
that silly body that wanted Burns to alter 
" Scots wha hae/' so as to lengthen the last line^ 
thus?— 

"Edward!" Chains and slavery! 

Here is a little poem I sent a short time since 
to a committee for a certain celebration. I un- 
derstood that it was to be a festive and con- 
vivial occasion, and ordered myself accordingly. 
It seems the president of the day was what is 
called a " teetotaler." I received a note from 
him in tlie following words, containing the copy 
subjoined, with the emendations annexed to it: 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 47 

^^ Dear Sir^ — Your poem gives great sat- 
is faction to the committee. The sentiments 
expressed with reference to liquor are not, how- 
ever, those generally entertained by this com- 
munity. I have therefore consulted the clergy- 
man of this place, who has made some slight 
changes, which he thinks will remove all objec- 
tions, and keep the valuable portions of the 
poem. Please to inform me of your charge for 
said poem. Our means are limited, etc., etc., 
etc., " Yours with respect." 

HEEE IT IS— WITH THE SLIGHT 
ALTERATIONS! 

Come! fill a fresh bumper, — for why should we go 

log-wood 
While the nc ote -y still reddens our cups as they 
flow? 

decoction 
Pour out the-^4e-h-3-afe83- still bright with the suHj, 

dye stuff 
Till o'er the brimmed crystal the 2Hi-b-ieG shall run. 

half-ripened apples 
The ^tK'pte-g'i-e'feea--eTii-3t^crr3- their life-dews have 
bled; 

taste sug-ar of lead 

How sweet is the - b - reat fe- of the feia^asa^g— ^^ 
■ s b Gd 4- 

rank poisons wines!!! 

For summer's ]ae-Vi?e««®- lie hid in the w4^^g - 

stable-boys smoking" 
That were g-arnered by l aiaidGiiH T.ho --4 e,ug'hed 
long-nines 
tfege- ugh - tliG ->4ee-QT 

scowl howl scoff sneer 

rhen a g E > i 4 e ; and a g.la s s-, and a ts^st, and a ei^ee?? 

strychnine and whiskey, and ratsbane and beer 

For a4-l-4j^€r^se£i..v:>r.£, -md 7;c'vg-sSxS-3-sJ-i-t~k£y-&4 



^-3 Tim AUTOCKAT OF TlliiJ 

In cellar, in pantrj-, in attic, in liall, 

Down, down with tlie tyrant that masters us all! 
x iO ag-H^c tlic gay s ervant thZvii laughs - f er-ns- all I - 

The company said I had been shabbily 
treated, and advised me to charge the com- 
mittee double — which I did. But as I never 
got my pay, I don^t know that it made much 
difference. I am a very particular person 
about having all I write printed as I write 
it. I require to see a proof, a revise, a re-revise, 
and a double re-revise, or fourth-proof rectified 
impression of all my productions, especially 
verse. Manuscripts are such puzzles! Why, I 
was reading some lines near the end of the last 
number of this journal, when I came across one 
beginning 

" The stream flashes by," — 

Now, as no stream had been mentioned, I was 
perplexed to know what it meant. It proved, 
on inquiry, to be only a mis-print for " dream." 
Think of it! No wonder so many poets die 
young. 

I have nothing more to report at this time, 
except two pieces of advice I gave to the young 
women at table. One relates to a vulgarism of 
language, which I grieve to sa}^ is sometimes 
heard even from female lips. The other is of 
more serious purport, and applies to such as 
contemplate a change of condition, — matri- 
mony, in fact. 

— The woman who " calculates " is lost. 

— Put not your trust in money, but put your 
money in trust. 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 49 



III. 



[The Atlantic obeys the moon, and its 
LuNiVEKSARY has come around again. I have 
gathered up some hasty notes of my remarks 
made since the last high tides, which I respect- 
fully submit. Please to remember this is talk; 
just as easy and just as formal as I choose to 
make it.] 

1 never saw an author in my life — sav- 
ing, perhaps, one — that did not purr as audibly 
as a full-grown domestic cat, (Felis Catus, 
Linn.,) on having his fur smoothed in the right 
way by a skillful hand. 

But let me give you a caution. Be very care- 
ful how you tell an author he is droll. Ten to 
one he will hate you; and if he does, be sure he 
can do you a mischief, and very probably will. 
Say you cried over his romance or his verses, 
and he will love you and send you a copy. You 
can laugh over that as much as you like — in 
private. 

Wonder why authors and actors are 

ashamed of being funny? — Why, there are ob- 
vious reasons, and deep philosophical ones. 
The clown knows very well that the women are 
not in love with him, but with Hamlet, the fel- 
low in the black cloak and plumed hat. Pas- 
sion never laughs. The wit knows that his 
place is at the tail of a procession. 

If you want the deep underlying reason, I 
must take more time to tell it. There is a ])er- 
fect consciousness in every form of wit — using 
that term in its general sense — that its essence 



5f> THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

consists in a partial and incomplete view of 
whatever it touches. It throws a single ray, 
separated from the rest^ — red, yellow, blue, or 
any intermediate shade, — upon an object; never 
v/hite light; that is the province of wisdom. 
We get beautiful effects from wit, — all the pris- 
matic colors, — but never the object as it is in 
fair daylight. A pun, which is a kind of wit, 
is a different and much shallower trick in men- 
tal optics; throwing the shadoivs of two objects 
so that one overlies the other. Poetry uses the 
rainbow tints for special effects, but always 
keeps its essential object in the purest white 
light of truth. — Will you allow me to pursue 
this subject a little further? 

[They didn't allow me at that time, for some- 
body happened to scrape the floor with his 
ehair just then; which accidental sound, as all 
must have noticed, has the instantaneous effect 
that Proserpina's cutting the yellow hair had 
upon infelix Dido. It broke the charm, and 
that breakfast was over.] 

Don't flatter yourselves that friendship 

authorizes you to say disagreeable things to 
your intimates. On the contrary, the nearer 
you come into relation with a person, the more 
necessary do tact and courtesy become. Ex- 
cept in cases of necessity, which are rare, leave 
your friend to learn unpleasant truths_ from his 
enemies; they are ready enough to tell them. 
Good-breeding never forgets that amour-propre 
is universal. When you read the story of the 
Archbishop and Gil Bias, you may laugh, if you 
will, at the poor old man's delusion; but don't 
forget that the youth was the greater fool of 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 51 

the two, and that his master served such a 
booby rightly in turning him out of doors. 

You need not get up a rebellion against 

what I say, if you find everything in my say- 
ings is not exactly new. You can't possibly 
mistake a man who means to be honest for a 
literary pickpocket. I once read an introduc- 
tory lecture that looked to me too learned for its 
latitude. On examination, I found all its eru- 
dition was taken ready-made from D'Israeli. 
If I had been ill-natured, I should have shown 
up the Professor^ who had once belabored me in 
his feeble way. But one can generally tell 
these wholesale thieves easy enough, and they 
are not worth the trouble of putting them in 
the pillory. I doubt the entire novelty of my 
remarks just made on telling unpleasant truths^ 
yet I am not conscious of any larceny. 

Neither make too much of flaws and occa- 
sional overstatements. Some persons seem to 
think that absolute truth, in the form of rigidly 
stated propositions, is all that conversation ad- 
mits. This is precisely as if a musician should 
insist on having nothing but perfect chords and 
simple melodies, — not diminished fifths, no 
fiat sevenths, no flourishes, on any account. 
'Now it is fair to say, that, just as music must 
have all these, so conversation must have its 
partial truths, its embellished truths, its exag- 
gerated truths. It is in its higher forms an art- 
istic product, and admits the ideal element as 
much as pictures or statues. One man who is a; 
little too literal can spoil the talk of a whole 
tableful of men of esprit. — "Yes," you stiy, "but 
who wants to hear fanciful people's nonsense? 



52 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

Put the facts to it, and then see where it is! " — • 
Certainly, if a man is too fond of paradox, — if 
he is flighty and empty, — if, instead of striking 
those fifths and sevenths, those harmonious dis- 
cords, often so much better than the twinned 
octaves, in the music of thought, — if, instead of 
striking these, he Jangles the chords, stick a fact 
into him like a stiletto. But remember that 
talking is one of the fine arts, — the noblest, the 
most important, and the most difficult, — and 
that its fluent harmonies may be spoiled by the 
intrusion of a single harsh note. Therefore, 
conversation which is suggestive rather than 
argumentative, which lets out the most of each 
talker's results of thought, is commonly the 
pleasantest and most profitable. It is not easy, 
at the best, for two persons talking together to 
make the most of each other's thoughts, there 
are so many of them. 

[The company looked as if they wanted an 
explanation.] 

When John and Thomas, for instance, are 
talking together, it is natural enough that 
among the six there should be more or less con- 
fusion and misapprehension. 

[Our landlady turned pale; — no doubt she 
thought there was a screw loose in my intel- 
lect, — and that involved the probable loss of a 
boarder. A severe-looking person, who wears 
a Spanish cloak and a sad cheek, fluted by the 
passions of the melodrama, whom I understand 
to be the professional ruffian of the neis^hbor- 
ing theater, alluded, with a certain lifting of 
the brow, drawing down of the corners of the 
mouth, and somewhat rasping voce di petto, to 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 53 

Falstaff's nine men in buckram. Everybody 
looked up. I believe the old gentleman oppo- 
site was afraid I should seize the carving-knife; 
at any rate, he slid it to one side, as it were 
carelessly.] 

I think, I said, I can make it plain to Ben- 
jamin Franklin here, that there are at least six 
personalities distinctly to be recognized as tak- 
ing part in that dialogue between John and 
Thomas. 

' 1. The real John; known only to 
his Maker. 
2. John's ideal John; never the 

rpv T 1, J real one, and often very un- 

Ihree Johns. ^ j.j^^ ^^^ 

Thomas's ideal John; never the 
real John, nor John's John, 
but often very unlike either. 

1. The real Thomas. 
Three Thomases, -l 2. Thomas's ideal Thomas. 
3. John's ideal Thomas. 



Only one of the three Johns is taxed; only 
one can be weighed on a platform-balance; but 
the other two are Just as important in the con- 
versation. Let us suppose the real John to be 
old, dull, and ill-looking. But as the Higher 
Powers have not conferred on men the gift of 
seeing themselves in the true light, John ver}^ 
possibly conceives himself to be youthful, 
witty, and fascinating, and talks from the point 
of view of this ideal. Thomas, again, believes 
him to be an artful rogue, we will say; there- 
fore he is, so far as Thomases attitude in the 
conversation is concerned, an artful rogue, 
though really simple and stupid. The same 



54 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

conditions apply to the three Thomases. It 
follows that^ until a man can be found who 
knows himself as his Maker knows him, or who 
sees himself as others see him, there must be at 
least six persons engaged in every dialogue be- 
tween two. Of these, the least important, phil- 
osophically speaking, is the one that we have 
called the real person. 'No wonder two disput- 
ants often get angry, when there are six of 
them talking and listening all at the same time. 

[A very unphilosophical application of the 
above remarks was made by a young fellow, an- 
swering to the name of John, who sits near me 
at table. A certain basket of peaches, a rare 
vegetable, little known to boarding-houses, was 
on its way to me via this unlettered Johannes. 
He appropriated the three that remained in the 
basket, remarking that there was just one apiece 
for him. I convinced him that his practical in- 
ference was hasty and illogical, but in the mean 
time he had eaten the peaches.] 

The opinions of relatives as to a man's 

powers are very commonly of little value; not 
merely because they overrate their own flesh 
and blood, as some may suppose; on the con- 
trary, they are quite as likely to underrate 
those whom they have grown into the habit 
of considering like themselves. The advent of 
genius is like what florists style the 'breaking of 
a seedling tulip into what we may call high- 
caste colors, — ten thousand dingy flowers, then 
one with the divine streak; or, if you prefer it, 
like the coming up in old Jacob's garden of 
that most gentlemanly little fruit, the seckel 
pear, which I have sometimes seen in shop- 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 55 

windows. It is a surprise, — there is nothing to 
account for it. All at once we find that twice 
two make five. Nature is fond of what are 
called "gift enterprises." This little book of 
life which she has given into the hands of its 
joint possessors is commonly one of the old 
story books bound over again. Only once in a 
great while there is a stately poem in it, or its 
leaves are illuminated with the glories of art, 
or they enfold a draft for untold values signed 
by the millionfold millionaire old mother her- 
self. But strangers are commonly the first to 
find the " gift " that came with the little book. 

It may be questioned whether anything can 
be conscious of its own flavor. Whether the 
musk-deer, or the civet-cat, or even a still more 
eloquently silent animal that might be men- 
tioned, is aware of any personal peculiarity, 
may well be doubted. No man knows his own 
voice; many men do not know their own pro- 
files. Everyone remembers Carlyle's famous 
^^ Characteristics " article; allow for exaggera- 
tions, and there is a great deal in his doctrine 
of the self-unconsciousness of genius. It comes 
under the great law just stated. This inca- 
pacity of knowing its own traits is often found 
in the family as well as in the individual. So 
Tiever mind what your cousins, brothers, sisters, 
uncles, aunts, and the rest, say about that fine 
poem you have written, but send it (postage 
paid) to the editors, if there are any, of the 
Atlaiilic, which, by the way, is not so called 
l)ecau?e it is a notion, as some dull wits wish 
they had sairl. but are too late. 

Scientific knowledge, even in the most 



S6 THE AUTOCEAT OF THE 

modest persons, has mingled with it a some- 
thing which partakes of insolence. Absolute^ 
peremptory facts are bullies, and those who 
keep company with them are apt to get a bully- 
ing habit of mind; — not of manners, perhaps; 
they may be soft and smooth, but the smile they 
carry has a quiet assertion in it, such as the 
Champion of the Heavy Weights, commonly 
the best-natured, but not the most diffident of 
men, wears upon what he very inelegantly calls 
his "mug." Take the man, for instance, who 
deals in the mathematical sciences. There is 
no elasticity in a mathematical fact; if you 
bring up against it, it never yields a hair's 
breadth; everything must go to pieces that comes 
in collision with it. What the mathematician 
knows being absolute, unconditional, incapa- 
ble of suffering question, it should tend, 
in the nature of things, to breed a despotic 
way of thinking. So of those who deal with 
the palpable and often unmistakable facts of 
external nature; only in a less degree. Every 
probability — and most of our common, work- 
ing beliefs are probabilities — is provided with 
'buffers at both ends, which break the force of 
opposite opinions clashing against it; but scien- 
tific certainty has no spring in it, no courtesy, 
no possibility of yielding. All this must react 
on the minds that handle these forms of truth. 

• Oh, you need not tell me thai T'/Frssrs. A. 

and B. are the most gracious, unassimning peo- 
ple in the world, and yet pre-eminent in the? 
ranges of science I am referring to. T know 
that as well as you. But mark this which I am 
going to say once for all: If I had not forcQ 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 57 

enough to project a principle full in the face 
of the half-dozen most obvious facts which 
seem to contradict it, I would think only in 
single file from this day forward. A rash man, 
once visiting a certain noted institution at 
South Boston, ventured to express the senti- 
ment that man is a rational being. An old 
woman who was an attendant in the Idiot 
School contradicted the statement, and ap- 
pealed to the facts before the speaker to dis- 
prove it. The rash man stuck to his hasty gen- 
eralization, notwithstanding. 

[ It is my desire to be useful to those 

with whom I am associated in my daily rela- 
tions. I not unfrequently practice the divine 
art of music in company with our landlady's 
daughter, who, as I mentioned before, is the 
owner of an accordeon. Having myself a well- 
marked baritone voice of more than half an 
octave in compass, I sometimes add my vocal 
powers to her execution of 

" Thou, thou reign'st in this bosom," — 

not, however, unless her mother or some other 
discreet female is present, to prevent misinter- 
pretation or remark. I have also taken a good 
deal of interest in Benjamin Franklin, before 
referred to, sometimes called B. F., or more 
frequently Frank, in imitation of that felicitous 
abbreviation, combining dignity and conven- 
ience, adopted by some of his betters. My ac- 
quaintance with the French language is very 
imperfect, I having never studied it anywhere 
but in Paris, which is awkward, as B. F. de- 
Votes himself to it with the peculiar advantage 



58 THE AUTOCKAT OF THE 

of an Alsatian teacher. Tlie boy^ I think, ia 
doing well^ between us, notwithstanding. The 
following is an uncorrected French exercise, 
written by this young gentleman. His mother 
thinks it very creditable to his abilities; though, 
being unacquainted with tlie French language, 
lier judgment cannot be considered final. 

Le Eat des Salons a Lecture. 

Ce rat ci est un animal fort singulier. II a deux 
pattes de derriere sur itesqiielles il niarche, et 
deux pattes de devant dont il fait usage pour 
tenir les journaux. Get animal a le peau noir 
pour le plupart, et j)orte un cercle bianchatre 
autour de son cou. On le trouve tous les jours, 
aux dits salons, ou il demeure, digere, s'il y a de 
quoi dans son interieur, respire, tousse, eternue,. 
dort, et ronfie quelquefois, ayant toujours le sem- 
blance de lire. On ne salt pas s'il a une autre gite- 
que Qela. II a I'air d'une bete tres stupide, mais il 
est d'une sagacite et d'une vitesse extraordinaire 
quand il s'agit de saisir un journal nouveau. On 
ne salt pourquoi il lit, parcequ'il ne parait pas. 
avoir des idees. II vocalise rarement, mais en 
revanche, il fait des bruits nasaux divers. II 
porte un crayon dans une de ses poclies pecto- 
rales, avec iequel il fait des marques sur les 
bords des journaux et des iivres, semblable aux 
suivans: ! ! ! — Bah! Pooh! II ne faut pas ccpen- 
dant les prendre pour des sig^nes d'inteiligence^ 
il ne vole pas, ordinairement; il fait rarement 
meme des echanges de parapluie, et jamais de- 
chapeau, parceque son chajieau a toujours un 
caractere specifique. On ne salt pas au juste ce 
dont il se nourrit. Feu Cuvier etait d'avis que 
e'etait de Fodeur du cuir des reliures; ee qu'on 
dit d'etre une nourriture animale fort saine, et 
peu chere. II vit bien longtems. Enfin il meure,, 
en laissant a ses heritiers une carte du Salon a 
Lecture ou il avait eviste pendant sa vie. On pre- 
tend qu'il revient toutes lea rj.iUSj aprea la mort.. 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 59 

«risiter le Salon. On pent le voir, dit on, a minuit, 
dans sa jjlace habituelle, tenant le journal du 
soir. et ayant a sa main nn crayon de charban. 
Le lendeniain on trouve des earacteres inconnus 
sur les bords du journal. Ce qui prouve que le 
spiritualisme est vrai, et que Messieurs les Pro- 
fesseurs de Cambridg-e sont des imbegiles qui ne 
savent rien du tout, du tout. 

I think this exercise, which I have not cor- 
rected, or allowed to be touched in any way, is 
very creditable to B. F. You observe that he is 
acquiring a knowledge of zoology at the same 
time that he is learning French. Fathers of 
families who take this periodical will find it 
profitable to their children, and an economical 
mode of instruction, to set them to revising 
and amending this boy's exercise. The passage 
was originally taken from the " Histoire Natu- 
relle des Betes Kuminans et Eongeurs, Bipedes 
et Autres," lately published in Paris. This was 
translated into English and published in Lon- 
don. It was republished at Great Pedlington, 
with notes and additions by the American 
editor. The notes consist of an interrogation- 
mark on page 53d, and a reference (p. 127th) to 
another book " edited " by the same hand. The 
additions consist of the editor's name on the 
title-page and back, with a complete and au- 
thentic list of the said editor's honorary titles in 
the first of these localities. Our boy translated 
the trans''ation back into French. This may be 
compared with the original, to be found on 
shelf 13, division X, of the Public Library of 
this metropolis.] 

Some of you boarders ask me from time 

to time why I don't write a story, or a novel. 



60 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

or something of that kind. Instead of answer- 
ing each one of you separately, I will thank 
you to step up into the wholesale department 
for a few moments, where I deal in answers by 
the piece and by the bale. 

That every articulately-speaking human being 
has in him stuff for one novel in three volumes 
duodecimo has long been with me a cherished 
belief. It has been maintained, on the other 
hand, that many persons cannot write more 
than one novel, — that all after that are likely to 
be failures. — Life is so much more tremendous 
a thing in its heights and depths than any 
transcript of it can be, that all records of hu- 
man experience are as so many bound Jierharia 
to the innumerable glowing, glistening, rust- 
ling, breathing, fragrance-laden, poison-suck- 
ing, life-giving, death-distilling leaves and flow- 
ers of the forest and the prairies. All we can 
do with books of human experience is to make 
them alive again with something borrowed from 
our own lives. We can make a book alive for us 
just in proportion to its resemblance in essence 
or in form to our own experience. Nov*' an 
author's first novel is naturally drawn, to a 
great extent, from his personal experiences; 
that is, is a literal copy of nature under various 
slight disguises. But the moment the author 
gets out of his personality, he must have the 
creative power, as well as the narrative art and 
the sentiment, in order to tell a living story; 
and this is rare. 

Besirles, there is great danger that a man's, 
first life-story shall clean him out, so to speak, 
of his best thoughts. Most lives, though their 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 61 

stream is loaded with sand and turbid with allu- 
vial waste, drop a few golden grains of wisdom 
as they flow along. Oftentimes a single crad- 
ling gets them all, and after that the poor man's 
labor is only rewarded by mud and worn peb- 
bles. All which proves that I, as an individ- 
ual of the human family, could write one novel 
or story, at any rate, if I would. 

Why don^t I, then? — Well, there are sev- 
eral reasons against it. In the first place^, I 
should tell all my secrets, and I maintain that 
verse is the proper medium for such revelations. 
Ehythm and rhyme and the harmonies of mu- 
sical language, the play of fancy, the fire of im- 
agination, the flashes of passion, so hide the 
nakedness of a heart laid open, that hardly any 
confession, transfigured in the luminous halo of 
poetry, is reproached as self-exposure. A beauty 
shows herself under the chandeliers, protected 
by the glitter of her diamonds, with such a 
broad snowdrift of white arms and shoulders 
laid bare, that, were she unadorned and in 
plain oalico, she would be uner.durable — in the 
opinion of the ladies. 

Again, I am terribly afraid I should show up 
all my friends. I should like to know if all 
story-tellers do not do this? Now I am afraid 
all my friends would not bear showing up very 
well; for they have an average share of the com- 
mon weakness of humanity, which I am pretty 
certain would come out. Of all that have told 
stories among us, there is hardly one I can re- 
call that has not drawn too faithfully some liv- 
ing portrait that might better have been spared. 

Once more, I have sometimes thought it pes- 



62 THE AUTOCKAT OF THE 

sible I might be too dull to write such a storj 
as I should wish to write. 

And finally, I think it very likely I shall 
write a story one of these days. Don't be sur- 
prised at any time if you see me coming out 
with '' The Schoolmistress " or " The Old Gen- 
tleman Opposite." [Ou7- schoolmistress and 
our old gentleman that sits opposite had left 
the table before I said this.] 1 want my glory 
for writing the same discounted now, on the 
spot, if you please. I will write when I get 
leady. How many people live on the reputa- 
tion of the reputation they might have made! 

1 saw you smiled when I spoke about the- 

possibility of my being too dull to write a good 
story. I don't pretend to know what you meant 
hy it, but I take occasion to make a remark that 
may hereafter prove of value to some among 
you. — When one of us who has been led by 
native vanity or senseless flattery to think him- 
self or herself possessed of talent arrives at the 
full and final conclusion that he or she is really 
dull, it is one of the most tranquilizing and 
blessed convictions that can enter a mortals- 
mind. All our failures, our short-comings, 
our strange disappointments in the efl^ect of our 
efforts are lifted from our bruised shoulders, 
and fall, like Christian's pack, at the feet of that 
Omnipotence which has seen fit to deny us the 
pleasant gift of high intelligence, — with which 
one look may overflow us in some wider sphere 
of being. 

How sweetly and honestly one said to me 

the other day, "I hate books!" A gentle- 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 63 

man, — singularly free from affectations, — not 
learned, of course, but of perfect breeding, 
which is often so much better than learning. — • 
by no means dull, in the sense of knowledge 
of the world and society, but certainly not 
clever either in the arts or sciences, — his com- 
pany is pleasing to all who know him. I did not 
recognize in him inferiority of literary taste 
half so distinctly as I did simplicity of charac- 
ter and fearless acknowledgment of his in- 
aptitude for scholarship. In fact, I think there 
are a great many gentlemen and others, who 
read with a mark to keep their place, that really 
"hate books,^' but never had the wit to find it 
out or the manliness to own it. \_Entre nous, I 
always read with a mark.] 

We get into a way of thinking as if what we 
call an " intellectual man " was, as a matter of 
course, made up of nine-tenths, or thereabouts, 
of book-learning, and one-tenth himself. But 
even if he is actually so compounded, he need 
not read much. Society is a strong solution of 
books. It draws the virtue out of what is best 
worth reading, as hot v/ater draws the strength 
of tea-leaves. If I were a prince, I would hire 
or buy a private or literary teapot, in which I 
would steep all the leaves of new books that 
promised well. The infusion would do for me 
without the vegetable fiber. You understand 
me; I would have a person whose sole business 
should be to read day and night, and talk to 
me whenever I wanted him to. I know the 
man I would have: a quick-witted, out-spoken, 
incisive fellow; knows history, or at any rate has 
a shelf full of books about it^ which he can use 



-64 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

handily, and the same of all useful arts and 
sciences; knows all the common plots of plays 
and novels, and the stock company of charac- 
ters that are continually coming on in new cos- 
tume; can give you a criticism of an octavo in an 
epithet and a wink, and you can depend upon 
it; cares for nobody except for the virtue there 
is in what he says; delights in taking off big 
wigs and professional gowns, and in the disem- 
balming and unbandaging of all literary mum- 
mies. Yet he is as tender and reverential to all 
that bears the mark of genius, — that is, of a new 
influx of truth or beauty, — as a nun over her 
missal. In short, he is one of those men that 
know everything except how to make a living. 
Him would I keep on the square next my own 
royal compartment on life's chessboard. To 
him I would push up another pawn, in the 
shape of a comely and wise young woman, 
whom he would of course take — to wife. For 
all contingencies I would liberally provide. In 
a word, I would, in the plebeian, but expressive 
phrase, " put him through " all the material 
part of life; see him sheltered, warmed, fed, 
button-mended, and all that, just to be able to 
lay on his talk when I liked, — with the privi- 
lege of shutting it off at will. 

A Club is the next best thing to this, strung 
like a harp, with about a dozen ringing intelli- 
gences, each answering to some chord of the 
macrocosm. They do well to dine together 
once in a while. A dinner party made up of 
such elements is the last triumph of civilization 
over barbarism. Nature and art combine to 
charm the senses; the equatorial zone of the 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 65 

system is soothed by well-studied artifices; the 
faculties are off duty, and fall into their natural 
attitudes; you see wisdom in slippers and science 
in a short jacket. 

The whole force of conversation depends on 
how much you can take for granted. Vulgar 
chess-players have to play their game out; noth- 
ing short of the brutality of an actual check- 
mate satisfies their dull apprehensions. But 
look at two masters of that noble game. White 
stands well enough, so far as you can see; but 
Eed says. Mate in six moves; — White looks, — • 
nods; — the game is over. Just so in talking 
with first-rate men; especially when they are 
good-natured and expansive, as they are apt to 
be at table. That blessed clairvoyance which 
sees into things without opening them, — that 
glorious license, which, having shut the door 
and driven the reporter from its keyhole, calls 
upon Truth, majestic virgin! to get off from her 
pedestal and drop her academic poses and take 
a festive garland and the vacant place on the 
medius ledus, — that carnival-shower of ques- 
tions and replies and comments, large axioms 
bowled over the mahogany like bomb-shells 
from professional mortars, and explosive wit 
dropping its trains of many-colored fire, and the 
mischief-making rain of hon-bons pelting every- 
body that shows himself, — the picture of a truly 
intellectual banquet is one that the old Divin- 
ities might well have attempted to reproduce in 

their 

Oh, oh, oh! " cried the young fellow 



whom they call John, — " that is from one of 
your lectures.' 



66 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

I know it, I replied — I concede it, I confess 
it, I proclaim it. 

" The trail of the serpent is over them all! " 

All lecturers, all professors, all schoolmasters^ 
have ruts and grooves in their minds into which 
their conversation is perpetually sliding. Did 
you never, in riding through the woods of a still 
June evening, suddenly feel than you had 
passed into a warm stratum of air, and in a 
minute or two strike the chill layer of atmos- 
phere heyond? Did you never, in cleaving the 
green waters of the Back Bay, — where the 
Provincial blue-noses are in the habit of beating 
the ^^Metropolitan '^ boat-clubs, — find yourself 
in a tepid streak, a narrow, local gulf-stream, 
a gratuitous warm bath a little underdone, 
through which your glistening shoulders soon 
flashed, to bring you back to the cold realities 
of full-sea temperature? Just so, in talking 
with any of the characters above referred to, 
one not unfrequently finds a sudden change in 
the style of the conversation. The lack-luster 
eye, rayless as a Beacon-Street door-plate in 
August, all at once fills with light; the face 
flings itself wide open like the church portals 
when the bride and bridegroom enter; the little 
man grows in stature before your eyes, like the 
small prisoner with hair on end, beloved yet 
dreaded of early childhood; you were talking 
with a dwarf and an imbecile, — you have a giant 

and a trumpet-tongued angel before you! 

Nothing but a streak out of a fifty-dollar lec- 
ture. As when, at some unlooked-for mo- 
ment, the mighty fountain column springs into 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 6^ 

the air before tlie astonislied passer-by, — silver- 
footed, diamond-crowned, rainbow-scarfecL — - 
from the bosom of that fair sheet, sacred to the 
hymns of quiet batrachians at home, and the 
epigrams of a less amiable and less elevated 
order of reptiUa in other latitudes. 

Who was that person that was so abused 

some time since for saying that in the conflict 
of two races our sympathies naturally go with 
the higher? 'No matter who he was. Now 
look at what is going on in India, — a white, 
superior " Caucasian ^' race, against a dark- 
skinned, inferior, but still " Caucasian " race, — ■ 
and where are English and American sympa- 
thies? We can't stop to settle all the doubtful 
questions; all we know is, that the brute nature 
is sure to come out most strongly in the lower 
race, and it is the general law that the human 
side of humanity should treat the brutal side 
as it does the same nature in the inferior ani- 
mals, — tame it or crush it. The India mail 
brings stories of women and children outraged 
and murdered; the royal stronghold is in the 
hands of the babe-killers. England takes down 
the Map of the World, which she has girdled 
with empire, and makes a correction thus: 
^ELKi. Dele. The civilized world says. 
Amen. 

Do not think, because I talk to you 

of many subjects briefly, that I should not 
find it much lazier work to take each one 
of them and dilute it down to an essay. 
Borrow some of my old college themes 
and water my remarks to suit yourselves, as 
the Homeric heroes did their melas oiiios, — that 



68 THE AUTOCEAT OF THE 

black, sweet, syrupy wine (?) which they used 
to alloy with three parts or more of the flowing 
stream. [Gould it have been melasses, as Web- 
ster and his provincials spell it, — or Molossa's, 
as dear old smattering, chattering, would-be- 
College-President, Cotton Mather, has it in the 
*^ Magnalia " ? Ponder thereon, ye small an- 
tiquaries, who make barn-door-fowl flights of 
learning in "Notes and Queries"! — ye Histor- 
ical Societies, in one of whose venerable 
triremes I, too, ascend the stream of time, while 
other hands tug at the oars! — ye Amines of 
parasitical literature, who pick up your grains 
of native-grown food with a bodkin, having 
gorged upon less honest fare, until, like the 
great minds Goethe speaks of, you have " made 
a Golgotha '^ of your pages! — ponder thereon!] 

Before you go, this morning, I want to 

read you a copy of verses. You will under- 
stand by the title that they are written in an 
imaginary character. I don't doubt they will 
fit some family-man well enough. I send it 
forth as " Oak Hall " projects a coat, on a 
'priori grounds of conviction that it will suit 
somebody. There is no loftier illustration of 
faith than this. It believes that a soul has been 
clad in flesh; that tender parents have fed and 
nurtured it; that its mysterious com pages or 
frame-work has survived its myriad exposures 
and reached the stature of maturity; that the 
Man, now self -determining, has given in his ad- 
hesion to the traditions and hal3its of the race 
in fnvor of artificial clothing: that he will, hav- 
ing nil the world to choose from, select the very 
iocalitv where this audneious 2:eneralizatioii 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 69^ 

has been acted upon. It builds a garment cut 
to the pattern of an Idea, and trusts that Nature 
will model a material shape to fit it. There 
is a prophecy in every seam, and its pockets are 
full of inspiration. — Now hear the verses. 

THE OLD MAN DREAMS. 

O for one hour of youthful joy! 

Give back my twentieth spring! 
I'd rather laugh a brig-ht-haired boy 

Than reign a gray-beard king! 

Off with the wrinkled spoils of age! 

Away with learning's crown! 
Tear out life's wisdom-w^ritten page^ 

And dash its trophies down! 

One moment let my life-blood sin-earn 

From boyhood's fount of flame! 
Give me one giddy, reeling dream 

Of life all love and fame! 

— My listening angel heard the prayeifg 

And calmly smiling, said, 
** If I but touch thy silvered hair 

Thy hasty wish hath sped. 

" But is there nothing in thy track 

To bid thee fondly stay, 
While the swift seasons hurry back 

To find the v/ished-for day? " 

— Ah, truest soul of womankind! 

Without thee, what were life? 
One bliss I cannot leave behind: 

I'll take — my — precious — wife ! 

— The angel took a sapphire pen 

And wrote in rainbow dew, 
" The man would be a boy again. 

And be a husband too! " 



70 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

— " And is there nothing yet unsaid 

Before the change ax>pears? 
Remember, all their giits have fled 

With those dissolving years! " 

Why, yes; for memory would recall 

My fond paternal joys; 
I could not bear to leave them all: 

I'll take — my — girl — and — boys! 

The smiling angel dropped his pen, — 

" Why, this will never do; 
The man would be a boy again, 

And be a father tool " 

And so I laughed, — my laughter woke 
The household with its noise, — 

And wrote my dream, when morning brokCs, 
To please the gray-haired boys. 



IV. 

[I AM so well pleased with my boarding-house 
that I intend to remain there, perhaps for j^ears. 
Of course I shall have a great mau}^ conversa- 
tions to report, and they will necessarily be of 
different tone and on different subjects. The 
talks are like the breakfasts, — sometimes dipped 
toasts, and sometimes dry. You must take 
them as they come. How can I do what all 
these letters ask me to? No. 1 wants serious 
and earnest thought. No. 2 (letter smells of 
bad cigars) must have more jokes; wants me to 
tell a " good storey " that he has copied out for 
me. (I suppose two letters before the word 
" good " refer to some Doctor of Divinity who 
told the story.) No. 3 (in female hand) — more 
poetry. No. 4 wants something that would be 



BREAKFAST TABLE. VI 

of use to a practical man. {Prahctical malm he 
probably pronounces it.) No. 5 (gilt-edged, 
sweet scented) — '^ more sentiment " — " heart's 
outpourings." 

My dear friends^ one and all, I can do nothing 
but report such remarks as I happen to have 
made at our breakfast-table. Their character 
will depend on many accidents, — a good deal on 
the particuhir persons in the company to whom 
they were addressed. It so happens that those 
which follow were mainly intended for the 
divinity-student and the schoolmistress; though 
others, whom I need not mention, saw fit to 
interfere, with more or less propriety, in the 
conversation. This is one of my privileges as 
a talker; and of course, if I was not talking 
for our whole company, I don't expect all the 
readers of this periodical to be interested in my 
notes of what was said. Still, I think there 
may be a few that will rather like this vein, — 
possibly prefer it to a livelier one, — serious 
young men, and young women generally, in 

life's roseate parenthesis from years of age 

to inclusive. 

Another privilege of talking is to misquote. 
— Of course it wasn't Proserpina that actually 
cut the yellow hair, — but Iris. It was the for- 
mer lady's regular business, but Dido had used 
herself ungenteelly, and Madame d'Enfer stood 
firm on the point of etiquette. So the bathycol- 
pian Here — Juno, in Latin — sent down Iris in- 
stead. But I w^as mightily pleased to see that 
one of the gentlemen that do the heavy articles 
for this magazine misquoted Campbell's line 
without anv excuse. " Waft us l}owo the to(?s- 



72 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

sage " of course it ought to be. Will he b« 
duly grateful for the correction?] 

The more we study the body and tlv> 

mind, the more we find both to be governed, 
not hy, but according to laws, such as we observe 
in the larger universe. You think you know all 
about walking, — don't you, now? Well how do 
you suppose your lower limbs are held to youv 
body? They are sucked up by two cupping 
vessels, (" cotyloid '' — cup-like — cavities,) and 
held there as long as you live, and longer. At 
any rate, you think you move them backward 
and forward at such a rate as your will de- 
termines, don't you? On the contrary, they 
swing just as any other pendulums swing, at a 
fixed rate, determined by their length. You 
can alter this by muscular power, as you can 
take hold of the pendulum of a clock and make 
it move faster or slower; but your ordinary 
gait is timed by the same mechanism as the 
movements of the solar system. 

[My friend, the Professor, told me all this, 
referring me to certain German physiologists 
by the name of Weber for proof of the facts, 
which, however, he said he had often verified. 
I appropriated it to my own use; what can one 
do better than this, when one has a friend that 
tells him anything worth remembering? 

The Professor seems to think that man and 
the general powers of the universe are in part- 
nership. Someone was saying that it had cost 
nearly half a million to move the Leviathan 
only so far as they had got it already. Why, — 
said the Professor, — they might have hired an 
EAETHQUAKE for Icss moucy!] 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 73 

Just as we find a mathematical rule at the 
bottom of many of the bodily movements, just 
so thought may be supposed to have its regu- 
lar cycles. Such or such a thought comes 
routtd periodically, in its turn. Accidental sug- 
gestions, however, so far interfere with the regu- 
lar cycles, that we may find them practically be- 
yond our power of recognition. Take all this 
for what it is worth, but at any rate you will 
agree that there are certain particular thoughts 
that do not come up once a day, nor once a week, 
but that a year would hardly go around without 
your having them pass through your mind. 
Here is one that comes up at intervals in this 
way. Someone speaks of it, and there is an 
instant and eager smile of assent in the listener 
or listeners. Yes, indeed; they have often been 
struck by it. 

All at once a conviction flashes through us that 
we have heeti in the same precise circumstances 
as at the present instant, once or many times 
before. 

0, dear, yes! — said one of the company, — 
everybody has had that feeling. 

The landlady didn't know anything about 
such notions; it was an idee in folks' heads, she 
expected. 

The schoolmistress said, in a hesitating sort 
of way, that she knew the feeling well, and 
didn't like to experience it; it made her think 
she was a ghost, sometimes. 

The young fellow whom they call John said 
he knew all about it; he had just lighted a 
cheroot the other day, when a tremendous con- 
viction all at once came over him that he had 



74 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

done just that same thing ever so many times 
before. I looked severely at him. and his 
countenance immediately fell — on the side to- 
ward me; I cannot answer for the other, for he 
can wink and laugh with either half of his face 
without the other half's knowing it. 

1 have noticed — 1 went on to say — the 

following circumstances connected with these 
sudden impressions. First, that the condition 
which seems to be the duplicate of a former one 
is often very trivial, — one that might have pre- 
sented itself a hundred times. Secondly, that 
the impression is very evanescent, and that it is 
rarely, if ever, recalled by any voluntary effort, 
at least after any time has elapsed. Thirdly, 
that there is a disinclination lo record the cir- 
cumstances, and a sense of iLLcapacity to repro- 
duce the state of mind in words. Fourthly, I 
have often felt that the duplicate condition had 
not only occurred once before, but that it was 
familiar, and as it seemed, habitual. Lastly, I 
have had the same convictions in my dreams. 

How do I account for it? — Why, there are 
several ways that I can mention, and you may 
take your choice. The first is that which the 
young lady hinted at; — that these flashes are 
sudden recollections of a previous existence. I 
don't believe that; for I remember a poor 
student I used to know told me he had such a 
conviction one day when he was blackina: his 
boots, and I can't think he had ever lived in 
another world where they used Day and Mar^:in. 

Some think that Dr. Wigan's doctrine of C ae 
brain's being a double organ, its hemispheres 
working together like the two eyes, accounts for 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 75 

it. One of the hemispheres hangs fire, they 
suppose, and the small interval between the per- 
ceptions of the nimble and the sluggish half 
seems an indefinitely long period, and therefore 
the second perception appears to be the copy of 
another, ever so old. But even allowing the 
center of perception to be double, I can see no 
good reason for supposing this indefinite length- 
ening of the time, nor any analogy that bears it 
out. It seems to me most likely that the coin- 
cidence of circumstances is very partial, but 
that we take this partial resemblance for iden- 
tity, as we occasionally do resemblances of per- 
sons. A momentary posture of circumstances 
is so far like some preceding one that we accept 
it as exactly the same, just as we accost a stran- 
ger occasionally, mistaking him for a friend. 
The apparent similarity may be owing, perhaps, 
quite as much to the mental state at the time as 
to the outward circumstances. 

Here is another of these curiously recur- 
ring remarks. I have said it and heard it many 
times, and occasionally met with something like 
it in books, — somewhere in Bulwer's novels, I 
think, and in one of the works of Mr. Olmsted, 
I know. 

Memory, imagination, old sentiments and 
associations, are more readily reached through 
the sense of smell than iy almost any other 
cliaiinel. 

Of course the particular odors which act upon 
eacli person's susceptibilities differ. — 0, yes! 
T will tell you some of mine. The smell of 
phosphorus is one of them. During a year or 
two of adolescence I used to be dabblincr in 



76 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

chemistry a good deal, and as about that time 
I had my little aspirations and passions like an- 
other, some of these things got mixed up with 
each other; orange-colored fumes of nitrous 
acid, and visions as bright and transient; red- 
dening litmus-paper, and blushing cheeks; — 
eheu ! 

" Soles occidere et redire possunt," 

but there is no reagent that will redden the 

faded roses of eighteen hundred and spare 

them! But, as I was saying, phosphorus fires 
this train of associations in an instant; its 
luminous vapors with their penetrating odor 
throw me into a trance; it comes to me in a 
double sense, " trailing clouds of glory/' Only 
the confounded Vienna matches, ohne plios- 
phor-geruch, have worn my sensibilities a little. 
Then there is the marigold. When I was of 
smallest dimensions, and wont to ride impacted 
between the knees of fond parental pair, we 
would sometimes cross the bridge to the next 
village-town and stop opposite a low, brown, 
" gambrel-roofed " cottage. Out of it would 
come one Sally, sister of its swarthy tenant, 
swarthy herself, shady-lipped, sad-voiced, and, 
bending over her flower-bed, would gather a 
" posy," as she called it, for the little boy. 
Sally lies in the churchyard with a slab of blue 
slate at her head, lichen-crusted, and leaning a 
little within the last few years. Cottage, gar- 
den-beds, posies, grenadier-like rows of seed- 
ling onions, — stateliest of vegetables, — all are 
gone, but the breath of a marigold brings therri 
all back to me. 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 17 

Perhaps the h'erb everlasting, the fragrant 
immortelle of our autumn fields, has the most 
suggestive odor to me of all those that set me 
dreaming. I can hardly describe the strange 
thoughts and emotions that come to me as I in- 
hale the aroma of its pale, dry, rustling flowers. 
A something it has of sepulchral spicery, as if it 
had been brought from the core of some pyra- 
mid, where it had lain on the breast of a mum- 
mied Pharaoh. Something, too, of immortality 
in the sad, faint sweetness lingering so long in 
its lifeless petals. Yet this does not tell why it 
fills my eyes with tears and carries me in bliss- 
ful thought to the banks of asphodel that bor- 
der the Kiver of Life. 

1 should not have talked so much about 

these personal susceptibilities, if I had not a re- 
mark to make about them that I believe is a new 
one. It is this. There may be a physical rea- 
son for the strange connection between the 
sense of smell and the mind. The olfactory 
nerve — so my friend, the Professor, tells me — is 
the only one directly connected with the hemi- 
spheres of the brain, the parts in which, as we 
have every reason to believe, the intellectual 
processes are performed. To speak more truly, 
the olfactory " nerve " is not a nerve at all, he 
says, but a part of the brain, in intimate con- 
nection with its anterior lobes. Whether this 
anatomical arrangement is at the bottom of the 
facts I have mentioned, I will not decide, but it 
is curious enough to be worth remembering. 
Contrast the sense of taste, as a source of sug- 
gestive impressions, with that of smell. Now 
the Professor assures me that you will find the 



78 THE AUTOCBAT OF THE 

nerve of taste has no immediate connection with 
the brain proper, but only with the prolonga- 
tion of the spinal cord. 

[The old gentleman opposite did not pay 
much attention, I think, to this hypothesis of 
mine. But while I was speaking about the 
sense of smell he rustled about in his seat, and 
presently succeeded in getting out a large red 
bandanna handkerchief. Then he lurched a 
little to the other side, and after much tribula- 
tion at last extricated an ample round snuff-box. 
I looked as he opened it, and felt for the 
wonted pugil. Moist rappee, and a Tonka-bean 
lying therein. I made the manual sign under- 
stood of all mankind that use the precious dust^, 
and presently my brain, too, responded to the 

long unused stimulus. boys, — that were, 

— actual papas and possible grandpapas, — some 
of you with crowns like billiard-balls, — some in 
locks of sable silvered, and some of silver sabled, 
• — do you remember, as you doze over this, those 
after-dinners at the Trois Freres, when the 
Scotch-plaided snuff-box went round, and the 
dry Lundy-Foot tickled its way along into our 
happy sensoria? Then it was that the Cham- 
bertin or the Clot Vougeot came in, slumbering 
in its straw cradle. And one among you, — do 
you remember how he would have a bit of ice 
always in his Burgundy, and sit tinkling it 
against the sides of the bubble-like glass, saying 
that he was hearing the cow-bells as he used to 
hear them, when the deep-breathing kine came 
home at twilight from the huckleberry pasture, 
in the old home a thousand leagues toward the 
sunset?] 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 79 

Ah, me! what strains and strophies of un- 
written verse pulsate through my soul when I 
open a certain closet in the ancient house where 
I was born! On its shelves used to lie bundles 
of sweet-marjoram, and pennyroyal, and laven- 
der, and mint, and catnip; there apples were 
stored until their seeds should grow black, 
which happy period there were sharp little milk 
teeth always ready to anticipate; there peaches 
lay in the dark, thinking of the sunshine they 
had lost, until, like the hearts of saints that 
dream of heaven in their sorrow, they grew fra- 
grant as the breath of angels. The odorous 
echo of a score of dead summers lingers yet in 
those dim recesses. 

Do I remember Byron's line about 

'^striking the electric chain"? — To be sure I do. 
I sometimes think the less the hint that stirs 
the automatic machinery of association, the 
more easily this moves us. What can be more 
trivial than that old story of opening the folio 
of Sliakspeare that used to lie in some ancient 
English hall and finding the flakes of Christ- 
mas pastry between its leaves, shut up in them 
perhaps "a hundred years ago? And, lo! as one 
look on these poor relics of a bygone genera- 
tion, the universe changes in the twinkling of 
an eye; old George the Second is back again, 
and the elder Pitt is coming into power, and 
General Wolfe is a fine, promising young man, 
and over the Channel they are pulling the Sieur 
Damiens to pieces with wild horses, and across 
ilie Atlantic the Indians are tomahawking 
Hirams and Jonathans and Jonases at Fort 
William Henry; all the dead people that have 



W THE AUTOCEAT OF THE 

been in the dust so long — even to the stout- 
armed cook that made the pastry — are alive 
again; the planet unwinds a hundred of its 
luminous coils, and the precession of the equi- 
noxes is retraced on the dial of heaven! And 
all this for a bit of pie-crust! 

1 will thank you for that pie, — said the 

provoking young fellow whom I have named re- 
peatedly. He looked at it for a moment, and 
put his hands to his eyes as if moved. — I was 
thinking, — he said, indistinctly 

How? What is't? — said our landlady. 

-I was thinking — said he — who was king 



of England when this old pie was baked, — and 
it made me feel bad to think how long he must 
have been dead. 

[Our landlady is a decent body, poor, and a 
widow, of course; cela va sans dire. She told 
me her story once; it was as if a grain of corn 
that had been ground and bolted had tried to 
individualize itself by a special narrative. 
There was the wooing and the wedding, — the 
start in life, — the disappointment, — the children 
she had buried, — the struggle against fate, — the 
dismantling of life, first of its small luxuries, 
and then of its comforts, — the broken spirits, — 
the altered character of the one on whom she 
leaned, — and at last the death that canve and 
drew the black curtain between her and all 
her earthly hopes. 

I never laughed at my landlady after she had 
told me her story, but I often cried, — not 
those pattering tears that run off the eaves upon 
our neighbors' grounds, the stilJindiiim of 
self-conscious sentiment, but those wliich steal 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 81 

noislessly through their conduits until they 
reach the cisterns lying round about the heart; 
those tears that we weep inwardly with un- 
changing features; such I did shed for her 
often when the imps of the boarding-house In- 
ferno tugged at her soul with their red-hot 
pincers.] 

Young man, — I said, — the pasty you speak 
lightly of is not old, but courtesy to those who 
labor to serve us, especially if they are of the 
weaker sex, is very old, and yet well worth re- 
taining. The pasty looks to me as if it were 
tender, but I know that the hearts of women 
are so. May I recommend to you the following 
caution, as a guide, whenever you are dealing 
with a woman, or an artist, or a poet; — if you are 
handling an editor or a politician, it is super- 
fluous advice. I take it from the back of one 
of those little French toys which contain paste- 
board figures moved by a small running stream 
of tine sand; Benjamin Franklin will translate 
it for you: " Quoiqu'elle soit tres soUdement 
montee, il faut ne pas bkutaliser la machine/* 
— I will thank you for the pie, if you please. 

[I took more of it than was good for me, — 
as much as 85°, I should think, and had an in- 
digestion in consequence. While I was suffer- 
ing from it, I wrote some sadly desponding 
poems, and a theological essay which took a 
very melancholy view of creation. When I got 
better, I labeled them all " Pie-crust," and 
laid them by as scarecrows and solemn warn- 
ings. I have a number of books on my shelves 
that I should like to label with some such title; 
but, as they have great names on their title- 



82 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

pages, — Doctors of Divinity, some of them, — it 
wouldn't do.] 

My friend, the Professor, whom I have 

mentioned to you once or twice, told me yes- 
terday that somebody had been abusing him 
in some of the journals of his calling. I told 
him that I didn't doubt he deserved it; that I 
hoped he did deserve a little abuse occasionally, 
and v/ould for a number of years to come; that 
nobody could do anything to make his neigh- 
bors wiser or better without being liable to 
abuse for it; especially that people hated to 
have their little mistakes made fun of, and per- 
haps he had been doing something of the kind. 
— The Professor smiled. — Now, said I, hear 
what I am going to say. It will not take many 
years to bring you to the period of life when men, 
at least the majority of writing and talking men, 
do nothing but praise. Men, like peaches and 
pears, grow sweet a little while before they begin 
to decay. I don't know what it is, — whether a 
spontaneous change, mental or bodily, or 
whether it is through experience of the thank- 
lessness of critical honesty, — but it is a fact, that 
most writers, except sour and unsuccessful ones, 
get tired of finding fault at about the time when 
they are beginning to grow old. As a general 
thing, I would not give a great deal for the fair 
words of a critic, if he is himself an author, 
over fifty 3^ears of age. At thirty we are all try- 
ing to cut our names in big letters upon the 
walls of this tenement of life; twenty years 
later we have carved it, or shut up our jack- 
knives. Tlien we are ready to help others, and 
care less to hinder any, because nobody's elbows 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 83 

are in our way. So I am glad yon have a little 
life left; you will be saccharine enough in a few 
years. 

Some of the softening effects of advanc- 
ing age have struck me very much in v/hat I 
have heard or seen here and elsewhere. I just 
now spoke of the sweetening process that 
authors undergo. Do you know that in the 
gradual passage from maturity to helplessness 
the harshest characters sometimes have a period 
in which they are gentle and placid as young 
children? I have heard it said, but I cannot be 
sponsor for its truth, that the famous chieftain, 
Lochieljwas rocked in a cradle like a baby, in his 
old age. An old man, whose studies had been 
of the severest scholastic kind, used to love to 
hear little nursery stories read over and over 
to him. One who saw the Duke of Wellington 
in his last years describes him as very gentle in 
his aspect and demeanor. I remember a per- 
son of singularly stern and lofty bearing who 
became remarkably gracious and easy in ail his 
ways in the later period of his life. 

And that leads me to say that men often re- 
mind me of pears in their way of coming to 
maturity. Some are ripe at twenty, like human 
Jargonelles, and must be made the most of, for 
their day is soon over. Some come into their 
perfect condition late, like the autumn kinds, 
and they last better than the summer fruit. 
And some that, like the Winter-lSTelis, have 
been hard and uninviting until all the rest have 
had their season, get their glow and perfume 
long after the frost and snow have done their 
worst with the orchards. Beware of rash criti- 



84 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

eisms; the rough and astringent fruit you con- 
demn may be an autumn or a winter pear, and 
that which you picked up beneath the same 
bough in August may have been only its worm- 
eaten windfalls. Milton was a Saint-Germain 
with a graft of the roseate Early-Catherine. 
Rich, juicy, lively, fragrant, russet-skinned old 
Chaucer was an Easter-Beurre; the buds of a 
new summer were swelling when he ripened. 

There is no power I envy so much- 
said the divinity-student — as that of seeing 
analogies and making comparisons. I don't un- 
derstand how it is that some minds are continu- 
ally coupling thoughts or objects that seem not 
in the least related to each other, until all at 
once they are put in a certain light, and you 
wonder that you did not always see that they 
were as like as a pair of twins. It appears to me 
a sort of miraculous gift. 

[He is a rather nice young man, and I think 
has an appreciation of the higher mental quali- 
ties remarkable for one of his years and train- 
ing. I try his head occasionally as housewives 
try eggs, — give it an intellectual shake and hold 
it up to the light, so to speak, to see if it has 
life in it, actual or potential, or only contains 
lifeless albumen.] 

You call it miraculous, — I replied, — tossing 
the expression with my facial eminence, a little 
smartly, I fear. — Two men are walking by the 
polyphloesboean ocean, one of them having a 
sm.all tin cup with which he can scoop up a 
gill of sea-water when he Avill, and the other 
nothing but his hands, which will hardly hold 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 85 

water at all, — and you call the tin cup a miracu- 
lous possession! It is the ocean that is the mira- 
cle, my infant apostle! Nothing is clearer than 
that all things are in all things, and that just 
according to the intensity and extension of our 
mental being we shall see the many in the one 
and the one in the many. Did Sir Isaac think 
what he was saying when he made Ms speech 
about the ocean, — the child and the pebbles, 
you know? Did he mean to speak slightingly 
of a pebble? Of a spherical solid which stooc' 
sentinel over its compartment of space befor 
the stone that became the pyramids had grow3 
solid, and has watched it until now! A bod^ 
which knows all the currents of force that tra 
verse the globe; which holds by invisible threads 
to the ring of Saturn and the belt of Orion! 
A body from the contemplation of which an 
archangel could infer the entire inorganic uni- 
verse as the simplest of corollaries! A throne 
of the all-pervading Deity, who has guided its 
every atom since the rosary of heaven was 
strung with beaded stars! 

So, — to return to our walk by the ocean, — if 
all that poetry has dreamed, all that insanity 
has raved, all that maddening narcotics have 
driven through the brains of men, or smothered 
passion nursed in the fancies of women, — if the 
dreams of colleges and convents and boarding- 
schools, — if every human feeling that sighs, or 
smiles, or curses, or shrieks, or groans, should 
bring all their innumerable images, such as 
come with every hurried heart-beat, — the epic 
that held them all, though its letters filled the 



86 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

zodiac, would be but a cupful from the infinite 
ocean of similitudes and analogies that rolls 
throusfh the universe. 

o 

[The divinity-student honored himself by 
the way in which he received this. He did not 
swallow it at once, neither did he reject it; but 
he took it as a pickerel takes the bait, and car- 
ried it off with him to his hole (in the fourth 
story) to deal with at his leisure.] 

Here is another remark made for his 

especial benefit. — There is a natural tendency 
in many persons to run their adjectives together 
in tf'iads, as I have heard them called, — thus: 
He was honorable, courteous, and brave; she 
was graceful, pleasing, and virtuous. Dr. John- 
son is famous for this; I think it was Bulwer 
who said you could separate a paper in the 
Rambler into three distinct essays. Many 
of our writers show the same tendency, — ^my 
friend, the Professor, especially. Some think it 
is in humble imitation of Johnson, — some that 
it is for the sake of the stately sound only. I 
don't think they get to the bottom of it. It is, 
I suspect, an instinctive and involuntary effort 
of the mind to present a thought or image with 
the three dime nsic ns tliat belong to every solid, 
— an unconscious handling of an idea as if it 
had length, breadth, and thickness. It is a 
great deal easier to say this than to prove it, 
and a great deal easier to dispute it than to dis- 
prove it. But mind this: the more we observe 
and study, the wider we find the range of the 
automatic and instinctive principles in body, 
mind, and morals, and the narrower the limits 
of the self-determining conscious movement. 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 8"? 

1 have often seen piano-forte players 

and singers make such strange motions over 
their instruments or song-books that I wanted 
to laugh at them. " Where did our friends pick 
up all these fine, ecstatic airs? " I would say to 
myself. Then I would remember My Lady in 
" Marriage a la Mode," and amuse myself with 
thinking how affectation was the same thing in 
Hogarth's time and in our own. But one day I 
bought me a canary bird and hung him up in a 
cage at my window. By and by he found him- 
self at home, and began to pipe his little tunes; 
and there he was, sure enough, swimming and 
waving about, with all the droopings and lift- 
ings and languishing side-turnings of the head 
that I had laughed at. And now I should like 
to ask. Who taught him all this? — and me, 
through him, that the foolish head was not the 
one swinging itself from side to side and bow- 
ing and nodding over the music, but that other 
which was passing its shallow and self-satisfied 
judgment on a creature made of finer clay than 
the frame which carried that same head upon its 
shoulders? 

Do you want an image of the human 

wiJl, or the self-determining principle, as com- 
pared with its prearranged and impassable re- 
strictions? A drop of water, imprisoned in a 
crystal; you may see such a one in any miner- 
alogical collection. One little fluid particle in 
the crystalline prism of the solid universe! 

Weaken moral oblisrations? — N'o, not 

weaken, but define them. When I preach that 
sermon I spoke of the other day, I shall have to 



88 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

lay down some principles not fully recognized 
in some of your text-books. 

I should have to begin with one most for- 
midable preliminary. You saw an article the 
other day in one of the journals, perhaps, in 
which some old doctor or other said quietly that 
patients were very apt to be fools and cowards. 
But a great many of the clergyman's patients 
are not only fools and cowards, but also liars. 

[Immense sensation at the table. — Sudden 
retirement of the angular female in oxydated 
bombazine. Movement of adhesion — as they 
say in the Chamber of Deputies — on the part of 
the young fellow they call John. Falling of 
the old-gentleman-opposite's lower jaw — (gravi- 
tation is beginning to get the better of him). 
Our landlady to Benjamin Franklin, briskly: 
Go to school right off, there's a good boy! 
Schoolmistress curious, — takes a quick glance 
at divinity-student. Divinity-student slightly 
flushed; draws his shoulders back a little, as if 
a big falsehood — or truth — had hit him in the 
forehead. Myself calm.] 

1 should not make such a speech as that^ 

you know, without having pretty substantial 
indorsers to fall back upon, in case my credit 
should be disputed. Will you run up-stairs, 
Benjamin Franklin, (for B. F. had not gone 
right off, of course,) and bring down a small 
volume from the left upper corner of the right- 
hand shelves? 

[Look at the precious little black, rilil^ed- 
backed, clean-typed, vellum-papered ;32]no., 
" Destbeeti Ftrasmi Colloquia. Amstelodami. 
Typis Ludoviei Elzevirii. 1650." Various 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 89 

names written on title-page. Most conspicuous 
this: Gul. Cookeson: E. Coll. Omn. Anim. 
1725. Oxon. 

William Cookeson, of All-Souls Col- 
lege, Oxford, — then writing as I now write, — 
now in the dust, where I shall lie, — is this line 
all that remains to thee of earthly remem- 
brance? Thy name is at least once more spoken 
by living men; — is it a pleasure to thee? Thou 
shalt share with me my little draught of immor- 
tality, — its week, its month, its year, — whatever 
it may be, — and then we will go together into 
the solemn archives of Oblivion's Uncatalogued 
Library!] 

If you think I have used rather strong 

language, I shall have to read something to you 
out of the book of this keen and witty scholar, 
— the great Erasmus, — who " laid the egg of the 
Eeformation which Luther hatched." Oh, you 
never read his Naufragium, or " Shipwreck," 
did you? Of course not; for, if you had, I don't 
think you would have giv^en me credit — or dis- 
credit — for entire originality in that speech of 
mine. That men are cowards in the contempla- 
tion of futurity he illustrates by the extraor- 
dinary antics of many on board the sinking 
vessel; that they are fools, by their praying to 
the sea, and making promises to bits of wood 
from the true cross, and all manner of similar 
nonsense; that they are fools, cowards, and liars 
all at once, by this story; I will put it into rough 
English for you. — '^ I couldn't help laughing to 
hear one fellow bawling out, so that he might 
be sure to be heard, a promise to Saint Christo- 
pher of Paris — the monstrous statue in the 



90 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

great church there — that he would give him a 
wax taper as big as himself. ^ Mind what you 
promise! ' said an acquaintance that stood near 
him, poking him with his elbow; ' you couldn't 
pay for it, if you sold all your things at auction.' 
' Hold your tongue, you donkey! ' said the fel- 
low, — but softly, so that Saint Christopher 
should not hear him, — ' do you think I'm in 
earnest? If I once get my foot on dry ground, 
catch me giving him so much as a tallow 
candle!'" 

ISTow, therefore, remembering that those who 
have been loudest in their talk about the great 
subject of wdiicli we were speaking have not 
necessarily been wise, brave, and true men, but, 
on the contrary, have very often been wanting 
in one or two or all of the qualities these vv^ords 
imply, I should expect to find a good many doc- 
trines current in the schools which I should be 
obliged to call foolish, cowardly, and false. 

So you would abuse other people's be- 
liefs. Sir, and yet not tell us your own creed! — 
said the divinity-student, coloring up with a 
spirit for which I liked him all the better. 

1 have a creed, — I replied; — none bet- 
ter and none shorter. It is told in two 
words, — the two first of the Paternoster. 
And when I say these words I mean them. 
And when I compared the human will 
to a drop in a crystal, and I said I 
meant to define moral obligations, and not 
weaken them, this was what I intended to ex- 
press: that the fluent, self-determining power 
of human beings is a very strictly limited 
agency in the universe. The chief planes of its 



BREAKFAST TAIiLE. 91 

inclosing solid are, of course, organization, edu- 
cation, condition.. Organization may reduce 
1lic power of the will to nothing, as in some 
idiots; and from this zero the scale mounts up- 
w^ard by slight gradations. Education is only 
second to nature. Imagine all the infants born 
this year in Boston and Timbuctoo to change 
places! Condition does less, but " Give me 
neither poverty nor riches " was the prayer of 
Agur, and with good reason. If there is any 
improvement in modern theology, it is in get- 
ting out of the region of pure abstractions and 
taking these every-day working forces into ac- 
count. The great theological questions now 
heaving and throbbing in the minds of Chris- 
tian men is this: 

No, I won't talk about these things now. My 
remarks might be repeated, and it would give 
my friends pain to see with what personal in- 
civilities I should be visited. Besides, what 
business has a mere boarder to be talking about 
such things at a breakfast-table ? Let him make 
puns. To be sure, he was brought up among the 
Christian fathers, and learned his alphabet out 
of a quarto " Concilium Tridentinum." He 
has also heard many thousand theological lec- 
tures by men of various denominations; and it is 
not at all to the credit of these teachers, if he is 
not fit by this time to express an opinion on 
theological matters. 

I know well enough that there are some of 
you who had a great deal rather see me stand 
on my head than use it for any purpose of 
thought. Does not my friend, the Professor, re- 
ceive at least two letters a week requepiing him 



92 THE AUTOCBAT OF THE 

to , — on the 

strength of some youthful antic of his, which, 
no doubt, authorizes the inteUigent constitu- 
ency of autograph hunters to address him as a 
harlequin ? 

Well, I can't be savage with you for 

wanting to laugh, and I like to make you laugh, 
well enough, when I can. But then observe 
this: If the sense of the ridiculous is one side 
of an impressionable nature, it is very well; 
but if that is all there is in a man, he had better 
have been an ape at once, and so have stood ajb 
the head of his profession. Laughter and tears 
are meant to turn the wheels of the same ma- 
chinery of sensibility; one is wind-power, and 
the other water-power; that is all. I have often 
heard the Professor talk about hysterics as be- 
ing Nature's cleverest illustration of the recip- 
rocal convertibility of the two states of which 
these acts are the manifestations; but you may 
see it every day in children; and if you want to 
choke with stifled tears at sight of the transi- 
tion, as it shows itself in older years, go and see 
Mr. Blake play Jesse Rural. 

It is a very dangerous thing for a literary man 
to indulge his love for the ridiculous. People 
laugh ivitli him just so long as he amuses them: 
but if he attempts to be serious, they must still 
have their laugh, and so they laugh at him. 
There is in addition, however, a deeper reason 
for this than would at first appear. Do you 
know that you feel a little superior to every 
man who makes you laugh, whether by making 
faces or verses? Are you aware that you have 
a pleasant sense of patronizing him, when you 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 93 

condescend so far as to let him turn somer- 
saults, literal or literary, for your royal delight? 
Now, if a man can only be allowed to stand on a 
dais, or raised platform, and look down on his 
neighbor who is exerting his talent for him, oh, 
it is all right! — first rate performance! — and all 
the rest of the fine phrases. But if all at once 
the performer asks the gentleman to come up- 
on the floor, and, stepping upon the platform, 
begins to talk down at him, — ah, that wasn't in 
the programme! 

I have never forgotten what happened when 
Sydney Smith — who, as everybody knows, was 
an exceedingly sensible man, and a gentleman, 
every inch of him — ventured to preach a ser- 
mon on the Duties of Royalty. The Quar- 
terly, " so savage and tartly," came down upon 
him in the most contemptuous style as " a joker 
of jokes," " a diner-out of the first water," in 
one of his own phrases; sneering at him, insult- 
ing him, as nothing but a toady of a court, 
sneaking behind the anonymous, would ever 
have been mean enough to do to a man of his 
position and genius, or to any decent person 
even. — If I were giving advice xo a young fellow 
of talent, with two or three facets to his mind, 
I would tell him by all means to keep his wit in 
the background until after he had made a repu- 
tation by his more solid qualities. And so to an 
actor: Hamlet first, and Bnh Logic afterward, 
if you iike; but don't think, as they say poor 
Ijistoii u?ed to, that people will be ready to 
allow that you can do anything great with Mac- 
heth's dagger after flourishing about with Paul 
Pry's umbrella. Do you know, too, that the 



94 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

majority of men look upon all who challenge 
their attention, — for a while, at least, — as beg- 
gars, and nuisances? They always try to gel off 
as cheaply as they can; and the cheapest of all 
things they can give a literary man — pardon 
the forlorn pleasantry! — is the fuiitiy -hone. 
That is all very well so far as it goes, but satis- 
fies no man, and makes a good many angry, as 
I told you on a former occasion. 

Oh, indeed, no! — I am not ashamed to 

make you laugh, occasionally. I think I could 
read you something I have in my desk that 
would probably make you smile. Perhaps I will 
read it one of these days if you are patient with 
me when I am sentimental and reflective; not 
just now. The ludicrous has its place in the 
universe; it is not a human invention, but one 
of the Divine ideas, illustrated in the practical 
jokes of kittens and monkeys long before 
Aristophanes or Shakspeare. How curious it is 
that we always consider solemnity and the ab- 
sence of all gay surprises and encounter of wits 
as essential to the idea of the future life of those 
whom we thus deprive of half their facul- 
ties and then called Messed! There are not a 
few who, even in this life, seem to be preparing 
themselves for that smileless eternity to which 
they look forward, by banishing all gayety from 
their hearts and all joyousness from their 
countenances. I meet one such in the street 
not unfrequently, a person of intelligence and 
education, but who gives me (and all that he 
passes) such a rayless and chilling look of rec- 
ognition, — something as if he were one of 
Heaven's assessors^ come down to " doom " 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 95 

every acquaintance he met, — that I have some- 
times begun to sneeze on the spot, and gone 
home with a violent cold, dating from that in- 
stant. I don't doubt he would cut his kitten's 
tail ofl:, if he caught her playing with it. 
Please tell me, who taught her to play with it? 
No, no! — give me a chance to talk to you, 
my fellow- boarders, and you need not be afraid 
that I shall have any scruples about entertain- 
ing yon, if I can do it, as well as giving you some 
of my serious thoughts, and perhaps my sad- 
der fancies. I know nothing in English or any 
other literature more admirable than that senti- 
ment of Sir Thomas Browne: " Eveky man 

TEULY LIVES, SO LONG AS HE ACTS HIS NATUKE, 
OE SOME WAY MAKES GOOD THE FACULTIES OF 
HIMSELF." 

1 find the great thing in this world is 

not so much where we stand, as in what direc- 
tion we are moving. To reach the port of 
heaven, we must sail sometimes with the wind 
and sometimes against it, — but we must sail, 
and not drift, nor lie at anchor.. There is one 
very sad thing in old friendships, to every mind 
that is really moving onward. It is this: that 
one cannot help using his early friends as the 
seaman uses the log, to mark his progress. 
Every now and then we throw an old school- 
mate over the stern with a string of thought 
tied to him, and look — I am afraid with a kind 
of luxurious and sanctimonious compassion — to 
see the rate at which the string reels off, Vvdiile 
he lies there bobbing up and down, poor fellow! 
and we are dashing along with the white foam 
: nc] brif^ht ?i^ark"!o r!: ciir bows:— the ruffled 



B6 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

bosom of prosperity and progress, with a sprig 
of diamonds stuck in it! But this is only the 
sentimental side of the matter; for grow we 
must, if we outgrow all that we love. 

Don't misunderstand that metaphor of heav- 
ing the log, I beg you. It is merely a smart 
way of saying that we cannot avoid measuring 
our rate of movement by those with whom we 
have long been in the habit of comparing our- 
selves; and when they once become stationary, 
we can get our reckoning from them with pain- 
ful accuracy. We see just what we were when 
they were our peers, and can strike the balance 
between that and whatever we may feel our- 
selves to be now. No doubt we may some- 
times be mistaken. If we change our last 
simile to that very old and familiar one of a 
fleet leaving the harbor and sailing in company 
for some distant region, we can get what we 
want out of it. There is one of our com- 
panions; — her streamers were torn into rags be- 
fore she had got into the open sea, then by and 
by her sails blew out of the ropes one after 
another, the waves swept her deck, and as night 
came on we left her a seeming wreck, as we 
flew under our pyramid of canvas. But lo! at 
dawn she is still in sight, — it may be in advance 
of us. Some deep ocean-current has been mov- 
ing her on, strong, but silent, — yes, stronger 
than these noisy winds that puff our sails until 
they are swollen as the cheeks of Jubilant 
cherubim. And when at last the black steam- 
tug with the skeleton arms, that comes out of 
the mist sooner or later and takes us all in 
tow, grapples her and goes off panting and 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 97 

groaning with her, it is to the harbor where all 
wrecks are refitted, and where, alas! we, tower- 
ing in our pride, may never come. 

So yon will not think I mean to speak lightly 
of old friendships, because we cannot help insti- 
tuting comparisons between our present and 
former selves by the aid of those who were what 
we were, but are not what we are. Nothing 
strikes one more, in the race of life, than to see 
how many give out in the first half of the 
course. "" Commencement day '^ always re- 
minds me of the start for the " Derby," when 
the beautiful high-bred three-year-olds of the 
season are brought up for trial. That day is 
the start, and life is the race. Here we are at 
Cambridge, and a class is just " graduating.'^ 
Poor Harry! he was to have been there too, but 
he has paid forfeit; step out here into the grass 
back of the church; ah! there it is: 

" HUNC LAPIDEM POSUERUNT 
SOCII MCERENTES." 

But this is the start, and here they are — coats 
bright as silk, and manes as smooth as eau lus- 
trale can make them. Some of the best of the 
colts are pranced round, a few minutes each, to 
show their paces. What is that old gentleman 
crying about? and the old lady by him, and the 
three girls, all covering their eyes for? Oh, 
that is their colt that has just been trotted up 
on the stage. Do they really think those little 
thin legs can do anything in such a slashing 
sweepstakes as is coming off in these next forty 
years? Oh, this terrible gift of second-sight 



98 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

that comes to some of us when we begin to look 
through the silvered rings of the arcus senilis! 

Ten years gone. First turn in the race. A 
few broken down; two or three bolted. Several 
show in advance of the ruck. Cassock, a black 
colt^ seems to be ahead of the rest; those black 
colts commonly get the start, I have noticed, 
of the others, in the first quarter. Meteor has 
pulled up. 

Twenty years. Second corner turned. Cas- 
soclc has dropped from the front, and Judex, an 
iron-gray, has the lead. But look! how they 
have thinned out! Down flat, — five, — six, — 
how many? They lie still enough! they will 
not get up again in this race, be very sure! 
And the rest of them, what a " tailing off " ! 
Anybody can see who is going to win, — 
perhaps. 

Thirty years. Third corner turned. Dives, 
bright sorrel, ridden by the fellow in a yellow 
jacket, begins to make play fast; is getting to be 
the favorite with many. But who is that other 
one that has been lengthening his stride from 
the first, and now shows close ud to the front? 
Don't you remember the quiet brown colt 
Asteroid, with the star in his forehead? That 
is he; he is one of the sort that lasts; look out 
for him! That black " colt,'' as we used to call 
him, is in the background, taking it easy in a 
gentle trot. There is one they used to call the 
Filly, on account of a certain feminine air he 
had; well up, you see; the Filly is not to be 
despised, my boy! 

Forty years. More dropping off, — but places 
much as before. 



BIJ.EAKFAST TABLE. 09t 

Fifty years. Race over. All that are on the 
course are coming in at a walk; no more run- 
ning. Who is ahead? Ahead? What I and 
the winning post a slab of white or gray stone 
standing out from that turf where there is no 
more jockeying or straining for victory! Well, 
the world marks their places in its betting-book; 
but be sure that these matter very little, if they 
have run as well as they knew how! 

Did I not say to you a little while ago 

that the universe swam in an ocean of simili- 
tudes and analogies? I will not quote Cowley, 
or Burns, or Wordsworth, just now, to show 
you what thoughts were suggested to them by 
the simplest natural objects, such as a flower or 
a leaf; but I will read you a few lines, if you do 
not object, suggested by looking at a section 
of one of those chambered shells to which is 
given the name of Pearly Nautilus. We need 
not trouble ourselves about the distinction be- 
tween this and the Paper Nautilus, the Argo- 
nauta of the ancients. The name applied to 
both shows that each has long been compared to- 
a ship, as you may see more fully in Webster's- 
Dictionary, or the " Encyclopedia," to which he 
refers. If you will look into Roget's Bridge- 
water Treatise, you will find a figure of one of 
these shells, and a section of it. The last will 
show you the series of enlarging compartments 
successively dwelt in by the animal that in- 
habits the shell, which is built in a widening 
spiral. Can you find no lesson in this? 



lUO THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

THE CHAMBEKED NAUTILUS. 

This is the ship of pearl, which, poets feign, 

Sails the unshadowed main,— 

The venturous bark that flings 
On the sweet summer wind its purpled wing's 
In g-ulfs enchanted, where the siren sing-s, 

And coral reefs lie bare. 
Where the cold sea-maids rise to sun theil 
streaming hair. 

Its we^^s of living gauze no more unfurl; 

Wrecked is the ship of pearl! 

And every chambered cell, 
Where its dim dreaming life was wont to dwell 
As the frail tenant shaped his growing shell, 

Before thee lies revealed, — 
Its irised ceiling rent, its sunless crypt unsealed! 

Year after year beheld the silent toil 

That spread his lustrous coil; 

Still, as the spiral grew. 
He left the past year's dwelling for the new, 
Stole with soft step its shining archway through, 

Built up its idle door, 
Stretched in his last-found home, and knew the 
old no more. 

Thanks for the heavenly message brought by thee. 

Child of the wandering sea, 

Cast from her lap, forlorn! 
From thy dead lips a clearer note is born 
Than ever Triton blew from wreathed horn! 

While on mine ear it rings, 
Through the deep caves of thought I hear a voice 
that sings: — 

Build thee more stately, mansions, O my soul. 

As the swift seasons roll! 

Leave thy low-vaulted past! 
Let each new temple, nobler than the last, 
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast, 

Till thou at length art free, 
Leaving thine outgrown s]-,eH by life's unresting 
sea! 



BKEAKPAST TABLE. 101 



A LYKic conception — my friend, the Poet, 
said — hits me like a bullet in the forehead. I 
have often had the blood drop from my cheeks 
when it struck, and felt that I turned as white 
as death. Then comes a creeping as of centi- 
pedes running down the spine, — then a gasp 
and a great jump of the heart, — then a sudden 
flush and a beating in the vessels of the head, — * 
then a long sigh, — and the poem is written. 

It is an impromptu, I suppose, then, if you 
write it so suddenly, — I replied. 

No, — said he, — far from it. I said written, 
but I did not say copied. Every such poem has 
a soul and a body, and it is the body of it, or the 
copy, that men read and publishers pay for. 
The soul of it is born in an instant in the poet's 
soul. It comes to him a thought, tangled in 
the meshes of a few sweet words, — words that 
have loved each other from the cradle of the 
language, but have never been wedded until 
now. Whether it will ever fully embody itself 
in a bridal train of a dozen stanzas or not is 
uncertain; but it exists potentially from the 
instant that the poet turns pale with it. It is 
enough to stun and scare anybody, to have a 
hot thought come crashing into his brain, and 
plowing up those parallel ruts where the 
wagon trains of common ideas were jogging 
along in their regular sequences of association. 
No wonder the ancients made the poetical im- 
pulse wholly external. Mrjviv aeiSe, Ocd' God- 
dess, — Muse, — divine afflatus, — something out- 



102 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

side always. I never wrote any verses worth 
reading. I can't. I am too stupid. If I ever 
copied any that were worth reading, I was only 
a medium. 

[I was talking all this time to our boarders, 
you understand, — telling them what this poet 
told me. The company listened rather atten- 
tively, I thought, considering the literary char- 
acter of the remarks.] 

The old gentleman opposite all at once 
asked me if I ever read anything better than 
Pope's " Essay on Man " ? Had I ever perused 
McFingal? He was fond of poetr}^ when he was 
a boy, — his mother taught him to say many lit- 
tle pieces, — he remembered one beautiful hymn; 
- — and the old gentleman began, in a clear, loud 
Toice, for his years, — 

" The spacious firmament on liig'h, 
With all the blue ethereal sky, 
And spangled heavens," 

He stopped, as if startled by our silence, and a 
faint flush ran up beneath the thin white hairs 
that fell upon his cheek. As I looked round, 
I was reminded of a show I once saw at the 
Museum, — the Sleeping Beauty, I think they 
called it. The old man's sudden breaking out 
in this way turned every face toward him, and 
each kept his posture as if changed to stone. 
Our Celtic Bridget, or Biddy, is not a foolish 
fat scullion to burst out crvina; for a sentiment. 
She is of the serviceable, red-handed, broad- 
and-high-shouldered type; one of those im- 
ported female servants who are known in public 
by their amorphous style of person, their stoop 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 103 

forward^ and a headlong and as it were precipi- 
tous walk, — the waist plunging downward into 
the rocking pelvis at every heavy footfall. 
Bridget, constituted for action, not for emotion, 
was about to deposit a plate heaped with some- 
thing upon the table, when I saw the coarse arm 
stretched by my shoulder arrested, — motionless 
as the arm of a terra-cotta caryatid; she couldn't 
set the plate down while the old gentleman was 
speaking! 

He was quite silent after this, still wearing 
the slight flush on his cheek. Don't ever think 
the poetry is dead in an old man because his 
forehead is wrinkled, or that his manhood has 
left him when his hand trembles! If they ever 
icejx there, they are there still! 

By and by we got talking again. Does a 

poet love the verses written through him, do you 
think. Sir? — said the divinity-student. 

So long as they are warm from his mind, 
carry any of his animal heat about them, / 
I'now he loves them, — I answered. When they 
have had time to cool, he is more indifferent. 

x\ good deal as it is with buckwheat cakes, — 
said the young fellow whom they call John. 

The last words, only, reached the ear of the 
economically organized female in black bom- 
bazine. Buckwheat is skerce and high, — she 

remarked. [j\Iust be a poor relation sponging 
on our landlady, — pays nothing, — so she must 
stand by the guns and be ready to repel 
boarders.] 

I liked the turn the conversation had taken, 
for I had some things I wanted to say, and so, 
after waiting a minute, I began again. — I don't 



104 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

think the poems I read 3'OU sometimes can be 
fairly appreciated^, given to you as they are in 
the green state. 

You don't know what I mean by the 

green state? Well, then, I will tell you. Cer- 
tain things are good for nothing until they have 
been kept a long while; and some are good for 
nothing until they have been long kept and 
used. Of the first, wine is the illustrious and 
immortal example. Of those which must be 
kept and used I will name three, — meerschaum 
pipes, violins, and poems. The meerschaum is 
but a poor affair until it has burned a thousand 
offerings to the cloud-compelling deities. It 
comes to us without complexion or flavor, — 
born of the sea-foam, like Aphrodite, but color- 
less as pallida Mors herself. The fire is lighted 
in its central shrine, and gradually the juices 
which the broad leaves of the Great Vegetable 
had sucked up from an acre and curdled into a 
dram are diffused through its thirsting pores. 
First a discoloration, then a stain, and at last a 
rich, glowing, umber tint spreading over the 
whole surface. Nature true to her old brown 
autumnal hue, you see, — as true in the fire of 
the meerschaum as in the sunshine of October! 
And then the cumulative wealth of its fragrant 
reminiscences! he who inhales its vapors takes 
a thousand whiffs in a single breath; and one 
cannot touch it without awakening the old joys 
that hang around it, as the smell of flowers 
clings to the dresses of the daughters of the 
house of Farina! 

[Don't think I use a meerschaum myself, for 
I do not, though I have owned a calumet since 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 105 

jiiy childhood, which from a naked Pict (of the 
Mohawk species) my grandsire won, together 
with a tomahawk and beaded knife-sheath; 
paying for the lot with a bullet-mark on his 
rig^it cheek. On the maternal side I inherit the 
loveliest silver-mounted tobacco-stopper you 
ever saw. It is a little box-wood Triton, carved 
with charming liveliness and truth; I have often 
compared it to a figure in Eaphael's " Triumph 
of Galatea.'' It came to me in an ancient 
shagreen case, — how old it is I do not know, — 
but it must have been made since Sir Walter 
Ealeigh's time. If you are curious, you shall 
see it any day. Neither will I pretend that I 
am so unused to the more perishable smoking 
contrivance, that a few whiifs would make me 
feel as if I lay in a ground-swell on the Bay of 
Biscay. I am not unacquainted with that fusi- 
form, spiral-wound bundle of chopped stems 
and miscellaneous incombustibles, the cigar, so 
called, of the shops, — which to " draw " asks 
the suction-power of a nursling infant Hercules, 
and to relish, the leathery palate of an old 
Silenus. I do not advise you, young man, even 
if my illustration strikes your fancy, to conse- 
crate the flower of your life to painting the bowl 
of a pipe, for, let me assure you, the stain of a 
reverie-breeding narcotic may strike deeper than 
you think for. I have seen the green leaf of 
early promise grow brown before its time under 
such Nicotian regimen, and thought the 
umbered meerschaum was dearly bought at the 
cost of a brain enfeebled and a will enslaved.] 
Violins, too, — the sweet old Amati! — the 
divine Stradivarius! Played on by ancient 



106 THE AUTOCKAT OF THE 

maestros until the bow-hand lost its power and 
the flying fingers stiffened. Bequeathed to the 
passionate young enthusiast, who made it whis- 
per his hidden love, and cry his inarticulate 
longings, and scream his untold agonies, and 
wail his monotonous despair. Passed from hi& 
dying hand to the cold virtuoso, who let it slum- 
ber in its case for a generation, till, when his 
hoard w^as broken up, it came forth once more 
and rode the stormy symphonies of royal 
orchestras, beneath the rushing bow of their 
lord and leader. Into lonely prisons with im- 
provident artists; into convents from which 
arose, day and night, the holy hymns with 
which its tones were blended; and back again 
to orgies in which it learned to howl and laugh 
as if a legion of devils vv'ere shut up in it; then 
again to the gentle dilettante who calmed it 
down with easy melodies until it answered him 
softly as in the days of the old maestros. And 
so given into our hands, its pores all full of 
music; stained, like the meerschaum, through, 
and through, with the concentrated hue and 
sweetness of all the harmonies that have kin- 
dled and faded on its strings. 

Now I tell you a poem must be kept and used, 
like a meerschaum, or a violin. A poem is just 
as porous as the meerschaum; — the more por- 
ous it is, the better. I mean to say that a genu- 
ine poem is capable of absorbing an indefinite 
amount of the essence of our own humanity, — 
its tenderness- its heroism, its regrets, its aspira- 
tions, so as to be gradually stained through 
with a divine secondary color derived from our- 
i:*.e]v!"^. S^ voii see it uinr-t take tim^ to brin^ 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 107 

the sentiment of a poem into harmony with our 
nature, by straining ourselves through every 
thought and image our being can penetrate. 

Then again as to the mere music of a new 
poem; why, who can expect anything more 
from that than from the nmsic of a violin fresh 
from the maker's hands? Now you know very 
well that there are no less than fifty-eight dif- 
ferent pieces in a violin. These pieces are 
strangers to each other, and it takes a century, 
more or less, to make them thoroughly ac- 
quainted. At last they learn to vibrate in har- 
mony, and the instrument becomes an organic 
whole, as if it were a great seed-capsule that 
had grown from a garden-bed in Cremona, or 
elsewhere. Besides, the wood is juicy and full 
of sap for fifty years or so, but at the end of 
fifty or a hundred more gets tolerably dry and 
comparatively resonant. 

Don't you see that all this is just as true of a 
poem? Counting each word as a piece, there 
4ire more pieces in an average copy of verses 
than in a violin. The poet has forced all these 
words together, and fastened them, and they 
don't understand it at first. But let the poem 
be repeated aloud and murmured over in the 
mind's muffled whisper often enough, and at 
length the parts become knit together in such 
absolute solidarity that you could not change 
a syllable without the whole world's crying out 
against you for meddling with the harmonious 
fabric. Observe, too, how the dr3dng process 
takes plnce in the stuff of a poem just as in that 
of a violin. Here is a Tyrol ese fiddle that is 
just coming to its hundredth birthday, — (Pedro 



108 TIJK AUToCKAT OF THE 

Klauss, Tyroli, fecit, 1760^) — the sap is pretty 
well out of it. And here is the song of an old 
poet whom Neaera cheated: — 

" Nox erat, et coelo f ulgebat Luna serene 
Inter minora sidera, 
Cum tu magnorum numen lassura deorum 
In verba jurabas mea." 

Don't yoii perceive the sonorousness of these 
old dead Latin phrases? 'Now I tell you that 
every word fresh from the dictionary brings 
with it a certain succulence; and though I can- 
not expect the sheets of the Pactolian,m which, 
as I told you, I sometimes print my verses, to 
get so dry as the crisp papyrus that held those 
words of Iloratius Flaccus, yet you may be sure, 
that, while the sheets are damp, and while the 
lines hold their sap, you can't fairly judge of 
my performances, and that, if made of the true 
stuff, they will ring better after a while. 

[There was silence for a brief space, after 
my somewhat elaborate exposition of these self- 
evident analogies. Presently a person turned 
toward me — I do not choose to designate the 
individual — and said that he rather expected 
my pieces had given pretty good " sahtisfahc- 
tion." — I had, up to this moment, considered 
this complimentary phrase as sacred to the use 
of secretaries of lyceums, and, as it has been 
usually accompanied by a small pecuniary testi- 
monial, have acquired a certain relish for this 
moderately tepid and unstimulating expression 
of enthusiasm. But as a reward for gratuitous 
services, I confess I thought it a little below 
that blood-heat standard which a man's breath 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 109 

ought to have^ whether silent, or vocal and 
articulate. I waited for a favorable opportu- 
nity, however, before making the remarks 
which follow.] 

There are single expressions, as I have 

told you already, that fix a man's position for 
you before you have done shaking hands with 
him. Allow me to expand a little. There are 
several things, very slight in themselves, yet 
implying other things not so unimportant. 
Thus, your French servant has devalise your 
premises and got caught. Excusez, says the 
sergent-de-ville, as he politely relieves him of 
his upper garments and displays his bust in the 
full daylight. Good shoulders enough, — a little 
marked, — traces of small-pox, perhaps, — but 
white . . . Crew! from the sergent-de-ville' s 
broad palm on the white shoulder! Now look! 
Vogue la gaUre! Out comes the big red V — 
mark of the hot iron; — he had blistered it out 
pretty nearly, — hadn't he? — the old rascal 
VOLEUE, branded in the galleys at Marseilles! 
[Don"t! What if he has got something like 
tliis? — nobody supposes I invented such a story.] 

My man John, who used to drive two of those 
six equine females which I told you I had 
owned, — for, look you, my friends, simple 
though I stand here, I am one that has been 
driven in his " kerridge," — not using that term, 
as hberal shepherds do, for any battered old 
shabby-genteel go-cart that has more than one 
wheel, but meaning thereby a four-wheeled 
vehicle tuilJi a pole, — my man John, I say, was 
a retired soldier. He retired unostentatiously, 
as many of Her ]\Iajesty's modest servants have 



110 THE AUTOCBAT OF THE 

done before and since. John told me, that 
when an officer thinks he recognizes one of 
these retiring heroes, and would know if he has 
really been in the service, that he may restore 
him, if possible, to a grateful country, he comes 
suddenly upon him, and says, sharply, "Strap!'' 
If he has ever worn the shoulder-strap, he has 
learned the reprimand for its ill adjustment. 
The old word of command flashes through his 
muscles, and his hand goes up in an instant 
to the place where the strap used to be. 

[I was all the time preparing for my grand 
coup, you understand; but I saw they were not 
quite ready for it, and so continued, — always in 
illustration of the general principle I had laid 
down.] 

Yes, odd things come out in ways that nobody 
thinks of. There was a legend, that, when the 
Danish pirates made descents upon the Eng- 
lish coast, they caught a few Tartars occasion- 
ally, in the shape of Saxons, that would not 
let them go, — on the contrary, insisted on their 
staying, and, to make sure of it, treated them 
as Apollo treated Marsyas, or as Bartholinus 
has treated a fellow-creature in his title page, 
and, having divested them of the one essential 
and perfectly fitting garment, indispensable in 
the mildest climates, nailed the same on the 
church-door as we do the banns of marriage, in 
terrorem. 

[There was a laugh at this among some of 
the young folks; but as I looked at our land- 
lady, I saw that " the water stood in her eyes," 
as it did in Christiana's when the interpreter 
asked her about the spider, and that the school- 



BUEAKi'AST TABLE. Ill 

mistress bluslied, as Mercy did in tlie same con- 
versation, as yoLi remember.] 

That sounds like a cock-and-bull-story, — said 
the young fellow whom they call John. I ab- 
stained from making Hamlet's remark to 
Horatio, and continued. 

Not long since, the church-wardens were 
repairing and beautifying an old Saxon church 
in a certain English village, and among other 
things thought the doors should be attended to. 
One of them particularly, the front-door, looked 
very badly crusted, as it were, and as if it would 
be all the better for scraping. There hap- 
pened to be a microscopist in the village who 
had heard the old pirate story, and he took it 
into his head to examine the crust on this door. 
There was no mistake about it; it was a genuine 
historical document, of the Ziska drum-head 
pattern, — a real cutis humana, stripped from 
some old Scandinavian filibuster, — and the 
legend was true. 

My friend, the Professor, settled an impor- 
tant historical and financial question once by 
the aid of an exceedingly minute fragment of a 
similar document. Behind the pane of plate- 
glass which bore his name and title burned a 
modest lamp, signifying to the passers-by that 
at all hours of the night the slightest favors (or 
fevers) were welcome. A youth who had freely 
partaken of the cup which cheers and like- 
wise inebriates, following a moth-like impulse 
very natural under the circumstances, dashed 
liis fist at the light and quenched the meek 
luminary, — breaking through the plate-glass, of 
course, to reach it. Now I don't want to go 



112 THE AUTOCKAT OF THE 

into minutice at table, you know, but a naked 
hand can no more go through a pane of thick 
glass without leaving some of its cuticle, to say 
the least, behind it, than a butterfly can go 
through a sausage machine without looking the 
worse for it. The Professor gathered up the 
fragments of glass, and with them certain very 
minute but entirely satisfactory documents 
which would have identified and hanged any 
rogue in Christendom who had parted with 
them. — The historical question. Who did it? and 
the financial question. Who paid for it? were 
both settled before the new lamp was lighted 
the next evening. 

You see, my friends, what immense conclu- 
sions, touching our lives, our fortunes, and our 
sacred honor, may be reached by means of very 
insignificant premises. This is eminently true 
of manners and forms of speech; a movement 
or a phrase often tells you all you want to know 
about a person. Thus, " How's your health ? '' 
(commonly pronounced hadlth) — instead of, 
How do you do? or. How are you? Or calling 
your little dark entry a " hall," and your old 
rickety one-horse wagon a " kerridge.'' Or 
telling a person who has been trying to please 
you that he has given pretty good " sahtisfahc- 
tion." Or saying that you " remember of " 
«uch a thing, or that you have been " stoppin' '' 
at Deacon Somebody's, — and other such expres- 
sions. One of my friends had a little marble 
statuette of Cupid in the parlor of his coun- 
try-house, — bow, arrows, wings, and all com- 
plete. A visitor, indigenous to the region, 
looking pensively at the figure, asked the lady 



BREAKFAST TABLE. IIS 

of the house " if that was a stattoo of her de- 
ceased infant? " What a delicious, though 
somewhat voluminous biography, social, edu- 
cational, and aesthetic in that brief question! 

[riease observe with what Machiavellian 
astuteness I smuggled in the particular oll'ense 
which it was my object to hold up to my fellow- 
boarders, without too personal an attack on the 
individual at whose door it lay.] 

That was an exceedingly dull person who 
made the remark, JEx pede Herculem. He 
might as well have said, " From a peck of apples 
you may judge of the barrel." Ex pede, to be 
sure! Read, instead. Ex ungue minimi digiti 
pedis, Herculem, ejusque patrem, matrem, avos 
el proavos, filios, nepotes et pronepotes! Talk to 
me about your Sb<s ttov a-TiH) ! Tell me about 
Cuvier's getting up a megatherium from a 
tooth, or Agassiz's drawing a portrait of an un- 
discovered fish from a single scale! As the 
" " revealed Giotto, — as the one word " moi " 
betrayed the Stratford-atte-Bowe-taught Ang- 
lais, — so all a man's antecedents and possibili- 
ties are summed up in a single utterance which 
gives at once the gauge of his education and his 
mental organization. 

Possibilities, Sir? — said the divinity-student; 
can't a man who says Haow? arrive at distinc- 
tion? 

Sir, — I replied, — in a republic all things are 
possible. But the man with a future has almost 
of necessity sense enough to see that any odious 
trick of speech or manners must be got rid of. 
Doesn't Sydney Smith say that a public man in 
England never gets over a false quantity uttered 



114 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

in early life? Our public men are in little dan- 
ger of this fatal misstep, as few of them are in 
the habit of introducing Latin into their 
speeches, for good and suificient reasons. But 
they are bound to speak decent English, — un- 
less, indeed, they are rough old campaigners, 
like General Jackson or General Taylor; in 
which case, a few scars on Priscian's head are 
pardoned to old fellows that have quite as 
many on their own, and a constituency of 
thirty empires is not at all particular, provided 
they do not swear in their Presidential Mes- 
sages. 

However, it is not for me to talk. I have 
made mistakes enough in conversation and 
print. " Don't " for doesn't, — base misspelling 
of Clos Vougeot, (I wish I saw the label on the 
bottle a little oftener,) — and I don't know how 
many more. I never find them out until they 
are stereotyped, and then I think they rarely 
escape me. I have no doubt I shall make half 
a dozen slips before this breakfast is over, and 
remember them all before another. How one 
does tremble with rage at his own intense mo- 
mentary stupidity about things he knows per- 
fectly well, and to think how he lays himself 
open to the impertinences of the captatores 
verhorum, those useful but humble scavengers 
of the language, whose business it is to pick up 
what might offend or injure, and remove it, 
hugging it and feeding on it as they go? I 
don't want to speak too slightingly of these 
verbal critics; — how can I, who am so fond of 
talking about errors and vulgarisms of speech? 
Onlv there is a difference between those clerical 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 115 

blunders which almosit every man commits^ 
knowing better, and that habitual grossness or 
meanness of speech which is unendurable to 
educated persons, from anybody that wears silk 
or broadcloth. 

[I write down the above remarks this morn- 
ing, January 26th, making this record of the 
date that nobody may think it was written in 
wrath, on account of any particular grievraice 
suffered from the invasion of any individual 
scarahceus grammaticus/\ 

1 wonder if anybody ever finds fault with 

anything I say at this table when it is repeated? 
I hope they do, I am sure. I should be very 
certain that I had said nothing of much sig- 
nificance, if they did not. 

Did you never, in walldng in the fields, come 
across a large flat stone, which had lain, nobody 
knows how long, just where you found it, Vv'ith 
the grass forming a little hedge, as it were, all 
round it, close to its edges, — and have you not, 
in obedience to a kind of feeling that told you 
it had been lying there long enough, insinuated 
your stick or your foot or your fingers under its 
edge and turned it over as a housewife turns 
a cake, when she says to herself " It's done 
brown enough by this time" ? What an odd 
revelation, and what an unforeseen and un- 
pleasant surprise to a small community, the 
very existence of which you have not suspected, 
until the sudden dismay and scattering among 
its members produced by your turning the old 
stone over! Blades of grass flattened down, 
colorless, matted together, as if they had been 
bleached and ironed; hideous crawling crea- 



116 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

tures, some of them coleopterous or horny- 
shelled, — turtle-bugs one wants to call them; 
some of them softer, but cunningly spread out 
and compressed like Lepine watches; (Nature 
never loses a crack or a crevice, mind you, or a 
joint in a tavern bedstead, but she always has 
one of her flat-pattern live timekeepers to slide 
into it;) black, glossy crickets, with their long 
filaments sticking out like the whips of four- 
horse stage-coaches; motionless, slug-like crea- 
tures, larv89, perhaps, more horrible in their 
pulpy stillness than even in the infernal wrig- 
gle of maturity! But no sooner is the stone 
turned and the wholesome light of day let upon 
this compressed and blinded community of 
creeping things, than all of them that enjoy 
the luxury of legs — and some of them have a 
;good many — rush around wildly, butting each 
other and everything in their way, and end in 
a general stampede for underground retreats 
from the region poisoned by sunshine. Next 
year you will find the grass growing tall and 
green where the stone lay; the ground-bird 
builds her nest where the beetle had his hole; 
the dandelion and the buttercup are growing 
there, and the broad fans of insect-angels open 
and shut over their golden disks, as the 
rh3rthmic waves of blissful consciousness pulsate 
through their glorified being. 

The young fellow whom they call John 

saw fit to say, in his familiar way, — at which I 
do not choose to take offense, but which I some-" 
times think it necessary to repress, — that I was 
coming it rather strong on the butterflies. 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 117 

No, I replied; there is meaning in each of 
those images, — the butterfly as well as the 
others: The stone is ancient error. The grass 
is human nature borne down and bleached of 
all its color by it. The shapes that are found 
beneath are the crafty beings that thrive in 
darkness, and the weaker organisms kept help- 
less by it. He who turns the stone over is who- 
soever puts the staff of truth to the old lying 
incubus, no matter whether he do it with a seri- 
ous face or a laughing one. The next year 
stands for the coming time. Then shall the na- 
ture which has lain blanched and broken rise in 
its full stature and native hues in the sunshine. 
Then shall God's minstrels build their nests in 
the hearts of a new-born humanity. Then shall 
beauty — Divinity taking outlines and color — ■ 
light upon the souls of men as the butterfly 
image of the beatified spirit rising from the 
dust, soars from the shell that held a poor 
grub, which would never have found wings, had 
not the stone been lifted. 

You never need think you can turn over any 
old falsehood without a terrible squirming and 
scattering of the horrid little population that 
dwells under it. 

Every real thought on every real sub- 
ject knocks the wind out of somebody or other. 
As soon as his bceath comes back, he very prob- 
ably begins to expend it m hard words. Tliese 
are the best evidence a man can have that he 
has said something it was time to say. Dr. 
Johnson was disappointed in the elfect of one 
of his pamphlets. "I think I have not been 



118 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

jittacked enough for it/' he said; — " attack is 
the reaction; I never think I have hit hard un- 
less it rebounds." 

If a fellow attacked my opinions in print, 

would I reply? — Not I. Do you think I don't 
understand what my friend, the Professor, 
long ago called the hydrostatic paradox of con- 
troversy ? 

Don't know what that means? — Well I will 
tell you. You know, that, if you had a bent 
tube, one arm of which was of the size of a 
pipe-stem, and the other big enough to hold the 
ocean, water would stand at the same height in 
■one as in the other. Controversy equalizes fools 
and wise men in the same way — and the fools 
Jcnow it. 

No, but I often read what they say about 

other people. There are about a dozen phrases 
that all come tumbling along together, like the 
tongs, and the shovel, and the poker, and the 
brush, and the bellows, in one of those domestic 
avalanches that everybody knows. If you get 
one, you get the whole lot. 

What are they? — Oh, that depends a good 
deal on latitude and longitude. Epithets fol- 
low the isothermal lines pretty accurately. 
Grouping them in two families, one finds him- 
self a clever, genial, witty, wise, brilliant, spark- 
ling, thoughtful, distinguished, celebrated, 
illustrious scholar and perfect gentleman, and 
fLrst writer of the age; or a dull, foolish, wicked, 
pert, shallow, ignorant, insolent, traitorous, 
l)lack-hearted outcast, and disgrace to civiliza- 
tion. 

What do I think determines the set of phrases 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 119 

a man gets? — Well, I should say a set of influ- 
ences something like these: — 1st. Eelation- 
«hipS; political, religious, social, domestic. 2d. 
Oysters; in the form of suppers given to gentle- 
men connected with criticism. I believe in the 
school, the college, and the clergy; but my sov- 
ereign logic for regulating public opinion — 
which means commonly the opinion of half a 
dozen of the critical gentry — is the following: 
Major proposition. Oysters au naturel. Minor 
proposition. The same " scalloped." Conclu- 
sion. That (here insert entertainer's name) 

is clever, witty, wise, brilliant, — and the rest. 

N"o, it isn't exactly bribery. One man 

has oysters and another epithets. It is an ex- 
change of hospitalities; one gives a " spread " 
on linen, and the other on paper, — that is all. 
Don't you think you and I should be apt to do 
just so, if we were in the critical line? I am 
sure I couldn't resist the softening influences of 
hospitality. I don't like to dine out, you know, 
— I dine so well at our own table, [our land- 
lad}^ looked radiant,] and the company is so 
pleasant [a rustling movement of satisfaction 
among the boarders]; but if I did partake of a 
man's salt, with such additions as that article 
of food requires to make it palatable, I could 
never abuse him, and if I had to speak of him, 
I suppose I should hang my set of jingling epi- 
thets round him like a string of sleigh-bells. 
Good feeling helps society to make liars of most 
of us, — not absolute liars, but such careless 
handlers of truth that its sharp corners get ter- 
ribly rounded. I love truth as chief est among 
the virtues; I trust it runs in my blood; but I 



120 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

would never be a critic, because I know I could 
not always tell it. I might write a criticism of 
a book that happened to please me; that is an- 
other matter. 

— Listen, Benjamin Franklin! This is for 
you, and such others of tender age as you may 
tell it to. 

When we are as 3^et small children, long be- 
for the time when those two grown ladies offer 
us the choice of Hercules, there comes up to 
us a youthful angel, holding in his right hand 
cubes like dice, and in his left spheres like mar- 
bles. The cubes are of stainless ivory, and on 
each is written in letters of gold — Truth. The 
spheres are veined and streaked and spotted be- 
neath, with a dark crimson flush above, where 
the light falls on them, and in a certain aspect 
you can make out upon every one of them the 
three letters L, I, E. The child to whom they 
are offered very probably clutches at both. The 
spheres are the most convenient things in the 
world; they roll with the least possible impulse, 
just where the child would have them. The 
cubes will not roll at all; they have a 
great talent for standing still, and always 
keep right side up. But very soon the young 
philosopher finds that things which roll so 
easily are very apt to roll into the wrong 
corner, and to get out of his way when lie most 
wants them, while he always knows ^vliere to 
find the others, which stay where they are left. 
Thus he learns — thus we learn — to drop the 
streaked and speckled globes of falsehood and 
to hold fast the white angular blocks of truth. 
But then comes Timidity, and after her Good- 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 121 

Bature^ and last of all Polite-behavior, all in* 
sisting that truth must roll or nobody can do 
anything with it; and so the first with her 
coarse rasp, and the second with her broad lile, 
and the third with her silken sleeve, do so 
round off and smooth and polish the snow- 
white cubes of truth, that, when they have got 
a little dingy by use, it becomes hard to tell 
them from the rolling spheres of falsehood. 

The schoolmistress was polite enough to say 
that she was pleased with this, and that she 
would read it to her little flock the next day. 
But she should tell the children, she said, that 
there were better reasons for truth than could 
be found in mere experience of its conveni- 
ence and inconvenience of lying. 

Yes, — I said, — but education always begins 
through the senses, and works up to the idea of 
absolute right and wrong. The first thing the 
child has to learn about this matter is that lying 
is unprofitable, — afterward, that it is against 
the peace and dignity of the universe. 

Do I think that the particular form of 

lyhig often seen in newspapers, under the title, 
*' From our Foreign Correspondent," does any 
harm? — Why, no, — I don't know that it does. 
I suppose it doesn't really deceive people any 
more than the " Arabian Nights " or " Gulli- 
ver's Travels " do. Sometimes the writers com- 
pile too carelessly, though, and mix up facts out 
of geographies, and stories out of the penny 
papers, so as to mislead those who are desirous 
of information. 1 cut a piece out of one of the 
papers, the other day, that contains a number 
of improbabilities, and, I suspect, misstate"* 



122 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

nients. I will send up and get it for you, if 

you would like to hear it. Ah, this is it; it 

in headed 



" This island is now the property of the 
Stamford family, — having been won, it is said, 

in a raffle, by Sir Stamford, during the 

stock-gambling mania of the South-Sea scheme. 
The history of this gentleman may be found in 
an interesting series of questions (unfortunately 
not yet answered) contained in the ' Notes and 
Queries/ This island is entirely surrounded by 
the ocean, which here contains a large amount 
of saline substance, crystallizing in cubes re- 
markable for their symmetry, and frequently 
displays on its surface, during calm weather, 
the rainbow tints of the celebrated South-Sea 
bubbles. The summers are oppressively hot, 
and the winters very probably cold; but this 
fact cannot be ascertained precisely, as, for 
some peculiar reason, the mercury in these 
latitudes never shrinks, as in more northern 
regions, and thus the thermometer is rendered 
useless in winter. 

" The principal vegetable productions of the 
island are the pepper tree and the bread-fruit 
tree. Pepper being very abundantly produced, 
a benevolent society was organized in London 
during the last century for supplying the na- 
tives with vinegar and oysters, as an addition to 
that delightful condiment. [Note received 
from Dr. D. P.] It is said, however, that, as 
the oysters were of the kind called na lives in 
England, the natives of Sumatra, in obedience 
to a natural instinct, refused to touch them^ and 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 123 

eonfined themselves entirely to the crew of the 
vessel in which they were brought over. This 
information was received from one of the oldest 
inhabitants^ a native himself, and exceedingly 
fond of missionaries. He is said also to be very 
skillful in the cuisine peculiar to the island. 

" During the season of gathering the pepper, 
the persons employed are subject to various in- 
commodities, the chief of which is violent and 
long-continued sternutation, or sneezing. Such 
is ttie vehemence of these attacks, that the "un- 
fortunate subjects of them are often driven 
backward for great distances at immense speed, 
on the well-known principle of the aeolipile. 
Not being able to see where they are going, 
these poor creatures dash themselves to pieces 
against the rocks or are precipitated over the 
clilis, and thus many valuable lives are lost an- 
nually. As, during the whole pepper-harvest, 
they feed exclusively on this stimulant, they 
become exceedingl}^ irritable. The smallest in- 
jury is resented with ungovernable rage. A 
young man suffering from the pepper-fever, as 
it is called, cudgeled another most severely for 
appropriating a superannuated relative of tri- 
fling value, and was only pacified by having a 
present made him of a pig of that peculiar 
species of swine called the Peccavi by the Cath- 
olic Jews, who, it is well known, abstain from 
swine's flesh in imitation of the Mohammedan 
Buddliists. 

" The bread-tree grows abundantly. Its 
branches are well known to Euroj^e and Amer- 
ica under the familiar name of maccaroni. The 
small twigs are called vermicelli. They have a 



124 THE AUTOCBAT OF THE 

decided animal flavor, as may be observed in the 
soups containing them. Maccaroni, being tubu- 
lar, is the favorite habitat of a very dangerous 
insect, which is rendered peculiarly ferocious by 
being boiled. The government of the island^ 
therefore, never allows a stick of it to be ex- 
ported without being accompanied by a piston 
with which its cavity may at any time be thor- 
oughly swept out. These are commonly lost or 
stolen before the maccaroni arrives among us. 
It therefore always contains many of these in- 
sects, which, however, generally die of old age 
in the shops, so that accidents from this source 
are comparatively rare. 

" The fruit of the bread-tree consists prin- 
cipally of hot rolls. The buttered - muffin 
variety is supposed to be a hybrid with the 
cocoa-nut palm, the cream found on the milk 
of the cocoa-nut exuding from the hybrid in the 
shape of butter, just as the ripe fruit is split- 
ting, so as to fit it for the tea-table, where it is 
commonly served up with cold " 

There, — I don't want to read any more 



of it. You see that many of these statements 
are highly improbable. — No, I shall not men- 
tion the paper. — No, neither of them wrote it, 
though it reminds me of the style of these popu- 
lar writers. I think the fellow that wrote it 
must have been reading some of their stories, 
and got them mixed up with his history and 
geography. I don't suppose lie lies; — he sells it 
to the editor, who knows how many squares off 
" Sumatra " is. The editor, who sells it to the 

public By the way, the papers have bee: 

very civil — haven't they? — to the — the — wha 






BREAKFAST TABLE. 125 

d^ye call it? — Northerti Magazine, — ^isn't it? — 
got up by some of these Come-outers, down 
East, as aii organ for their local peculiarities. 

The Professor has been to see me. Came 

in, glorious, at about twelve o'clock, last night. 
Said he had been with " the boys." On inquiry, 
found that " the boys " were certain baldish 
and grayish old gentlemen that one sees or hears 
of in various important stations of society. The 
Professor is one of the same set, but he always 
talks as if he had been out of college about ten 

years, whereas [Each of 

these dots was a little nod, which the company 
understood, as the reader will, no doubt.] He 
calls them sometimes " the boys," and some- 
times " the old fellows." Call him by the latter 
title, and see how he likes it. — Well, he came in 
last night, glorious, as I was saying. Of course, 
I don't mean vinously exalted; he drinks little 
wine on such occasions, and is well known to 
all the Johns and Patricks as the gentleman 
that always has indefinite quantities of black 
tea to kill any extra glass of red claret that he 
may have swallowed. But the Professor says 
he always gets tipsy on old memories at these 
gatherings. He was, I forget how many years 
old when he went to the meeting; just turned of 
twenty now, — he said. He made various youth- 
ful proposals to me, including a duet under the 
landlady's daughter's window. He had just 
learned a trick, he said, of one of " the boys," 
of getting a splendid bass out of a door-panel by 
rubbing it with the palm of his hand, — offered 
to sing '" The sky is bright," accompanying him- 
self on the front-door, if I would go down and 



136 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

help in the chorus. Said tliere was never aioniik 
a set of fellows as the old boys of the set he ha» 
been with. Judges, Mayors, Congressmen, Mr. 
Speakers, leaders in science, clergymen better 
than famous, and famous too, poets by the half- 
dozen, singers with voices like angels, financiers,, 
wits, three of the best laughers in the Common- 
wealth, engineers, agriculturists, — all forms of 
talent and knowledge he pretended were rep- 
resented in that meeting. Then he began to 
quote Byron about Santa Croce, and maintained 
that he could " furnish out creation ^' in all its 
details from that set of his. He would like to 
have the whole boodle of them, (I remonstrated 
against this word, but the Professor said it was 
a diabolish good word, and he would have no 
other,) with their wives and children, ship- 
wrecked on a remote island, just to see how 
splendidly they would reorganize society. They 
could build a city, — they have done it; make 
constitutions and laws; establish churches and 
lyceums; teach and practice the healing art; in- 
struct in every department; found observatories; 
create commerce and manufactures; write songs 
and hymns, and sing 'em, and make instruments 
to accompany the songs with; lastly, publish a 
journal almost as good as the Northern Maga- 
zine, edited by the Come-outers. There was 
nothing they were not up to, from a christening 
to a hanging; the last, to be sure, could never 
be called for, unless some stranger got in among 
them. 

1 let tbe Professor talk as long as he 

liked; it didn't make much difference to me 
whether it was all truths or partly made up of 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 127 

pale sherry and similar elements. All at once 
lie jumped up and said, — 

Don't you want to hear what I just road to 
the boys? 

I have had questions of a similar character 
asked me before, occasionally. A man of iron 
mold might perhaps say. No! I am not a man 
of iron mold, and said that I should be de- 
lighted. 

The Professor then read — with that slightly 
sing-song cadence which is observed to be com- 
mon in poets reading their own verses — the fol- 
lowing stanzas; holding them at a focal dis- 
tance of about two feet and a half, with an 
occasional movement back or forward for better 
adjustment, the appearance of which has been 
likened by some impertinent young folks to 
that of the act of playing on the trombone. His 
eyesight was never better; T have his word for it 

I\rAEE EUBEUM. 

Flash out a stream of blood-red wine! — 

For I would drink to other days; 
And brig-hter shall their memorj/ shine, 

Seen flaming- through its crimson blaze» 
The roses die, the summers fade; 

But every ghost of boyhood's dream 
By Nature's magic power is laid 

To sleei) beneath this blood-red stream. 

It filled the purple grapes that lay 

And drank the sx3lendors of the sun 
Where the long~ summer's cloudless day 

Is mirrored in the broad Garonne; 
I pictiires still the bacchant shapes 

That saw their hoarded sunlight shed, — 
The maidens dancing- on the grapes, — 

Their milk-white ankles splashed with red. 



128 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

Beneath these waves of crimson lie, 

In rosy fetters prisoned fast, 
Those flitting shapes that never die, 

The sw^ift-winged visions of the past. 
Kiss but the crystal's mystic rim, 

Each shadow rends its flowery chain, 
Springs in a bubble from its brim. 

And walks the chambers of the brain. 

Poor Beauty! time and fortune's wrong 

No form nor feature may withstand, — 
Thy wrecks are scattered all along, 

Like emptied sea-shells on the sand: — 
Yet, sprinkled with this blushing rain, 

The dust restores each blooming girl, 
As if the sea-shells moved again 

Their glistening lips of pink and pearl. 

Here lies the home of school-boy life. 

With creaking stair and wind-strept hall, 
And, scarred by many a truant knife, 

Our old initials on the wall; 
Here rest — their keen vibrations mute — 

The shout of voices known so well. 
The ringing laugh, the wailing flute, 

The chiding of the sharp-tongued bell. 

Here, clad in burning robes, are laid 

Life's blossomed joys, untimely shed; 
And here those cherished forms have strayed 

We miss awhile, and call them dead. 
What wizard fills the maddening glass? 

What soil the enchanted clusters grew, 
That buried passions wake and pass 

In beaded drops of fiery dew? 

Nay, take the cup of blood-red wine, — 

Our hearts can boast a warmer glow, 
Filled from a vintage more divine, — 

Calmed, but not chilled by winter's snow! 
To-night the palest wave we sip 

Rich as the priceless draught shall be 
That wet the bride of Cana's lip, — 

The wedding-wine of Galilee! 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 129 



VI. 



Sin has many tools^ but a lie is the handle 
which fits them all. 

1 think. Sir, — said the divinity-studentj, 

— you must intend that for one of the sayings 
of the Seven Wise Men of Boston you were 
speaking of the other day. 

I thank you, my young friend, — was my re- 
ply, — but I must say something better than 
that, before I could pretend to fill out the 
number. 

The schoolmistress wanted to know how 

many of these sayings there were on record, and 
what, and by whom said. 

Why, let us see, — there is that one of 

Benjamin Franklin, " the great Bostonian,'^ 
after whom' this lad was named. To be sure, 
he said a great many wise things, — and I don't 
feel sure he didn't borrow this, — he speaks 
as if it were old. But then he applied it so 
neatly! — 

'' He that has once done you a kindness \d\\ 
be more ready to do you another than he whom 
you yourself have obliged." 

Then there is that glorious Epicurean para- 
dox, uttered by my friend, the Historian, in 
one of his flashing moments: — 

" Give us the luxuries of life, and we will dis- 
pense with its necessaries." 

To these must certainly be added that other 
saying of one of the wittiest of men: — 

" Good Americans, when they die, go ta 
Paris." 



130 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

The divinity-student looked grave at 

this, but said nothing. 

The schoolmistress spoke out, and said she 
didn't think the wit meant any irreverence. It 
was only another way of saying, Paris is a 
heavenly place after New York or Boston. 

A jaunty-looking young person, who had 
come in with the young fellow they call John, 
— evidently a stranger, — said there was one 
more wise man's saying that he had heard; it 
was about our place, but he didn't know who 
said it. — A civil curiosity was manifested by the 
company to hear the fourth wise saying. I 
heard him distinctly whispering to the young 
fellow who brought him to dinner, Shall I tell 
it? To which the answer was. Go ahead! — 
Well, — he said, — this was what I heard: — 

" Boston State-House is the hub of the solar 
system. You couldn't pry that out of a Boston 
man, if you had the tire of all creation straight- 
ened out for a crowbar." 

Sir, — said I, — I am gratified with your re- 
mark. It expresses with pleasing vivacity that 
which I have sometimes heard uttered with ma- 
lignant dullness. The satire of the remark is 
essentially true of Boston, — and of all other 
considerable — and inconsiderable — places with 
which I have had the privilege of being ac- 
quainted. Cockneys think London is the only 
place in the world. Frenchmen — you remem- 
ber the line about Paris, the Court, the World, 
etc. — I recollect well, by the way, a sign in that 
city which ran thus: "Hotel de I'lJnivers et 
des Etats TJnis;" and as Paris is the Universe 
to a Frenchman, of course the United States 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 13 i 

are outside of it. — ^' See Naples and then die/* 
It is quite as bad with smaller places. I liave 
been about, lecturing, you know, and hr.ve 
found the following propositions to hold true 
of all of them. 

1. The axis of the earth sticks out visibly 
through the center of each and every tovrn or 
city. 

2. If more than fifty years have passed since 
its foundation, it is affectionately styled by the 

inhabitants the "good old town of '' 

(whatever its name may happen to he). 

3. Every collection of its inhabitants that 
comes together to listen to a stranger is in- 
variably declared to be a " remarkably intelli- 
gent audience." 

4. The climate of the place is particularly 
favorable to longevity. 

5. It contains several persons of vast talent 
little known to the world. (One or two of them, 
you may perhaps chance to remember, sent 
short pieces to the Pactolian som.e time since, 
which were " respectfully declined.") 

Boston is just like the other places of its 
size; — only, perhaps, considering its excellent 
fish-market, paid fire-department, superior 
monthly publications, and correct habit of 
spelling the English language, it has some 
right to look down on the mob of cities. I'll 
tell you, though, if you want to know it, what is 
the real offense of Boston. It drains a large 
water-shed of its intellect, and will not itself be 
drained. If it would only send away its first- 
rate men, instead of its second-rate ones, (no 
offense to well-known exceptions, of which we 



132 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

are always proud,) we should be spared such epi- 
grammatic remarks as that which the gentle- 
man has quoted. There can never be a real 
metropolis in this country, until the biggest 
center drains the lesser ones of their talent and 
wealth. — I have observed, by the way, that the 
people who really live in two great cities are by 
no means so jealous of each other, as are those 
of smaller cities situated within the intellectual 
basin, or suction-range, of one large one, of the 
pretensions of any other. Don't you see why? 
Because their promising young author and 
rising lawyer and large capitalist have been 
drained off to the neighboring big city, — their 
prettiest girl has been exported to the same mar- 
ket; all their ambition points there, and all 
their thin gilding of glory comes from there. 
I hate little toad-eating cities. 

Would I be so good as to specify any 

particular example? — Oh, — an example? Did 
you ever see a bear-trap? Never? Well, 
shouldn't you like to see me put my foot into 
one? With sentiments of the highest con- 
sideration I must beg leave to be excused. 

Besides, some of the smaller cities are charm- 
ing. If they have an old church or two, a few 
stately mansions of former grandees, here and 
there an old dwelling with the second story pro- 
jecting, (for the convenience of shooting the 
Indians knocking at the front-door with their 
tomahawks,) — if they have, scattered about, 
those mighty square houses built something 
more than half a century ago, and standing like 
architectural bowlders dropped by the former 
diluvium of wealth, whose refluent wave has left. 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 133 

them as its monument, — if they have gardens 
with elbowed apple-trees that push their 
branches over the high board-fence and drop 
their fruit on the side-walk, — if they have a 
little grass in the side-streets, enough to betoken 
quiet without proclaiming decay, — I think I 
could go to pieces, after my life's work were 
done, in one of those tranquil places, as sweetly 
as in any cradle that an old man may be rocked 
to sleep in. I visit such spots always with in-' 
finite delight. My friend, the Poet, says, that 
rapidly growing towns are most unfavorable ta 
the imaginative and reflective faculties. Let a 
man live in one of these old quiet places, he 
says, and the wine of his soul, which is kept 
thick and turbid by the rattle of busy streets^^ 
settles, and, as you hold it up, you may see the- 
sun through it by day and the stars by night. 

Do I think that the little villages have 

the conceit of the great towns? — I don't believe- 
there is much difference. You know how they 
read Pope's line in the smallest town in our 
State of Massachusetts? — Well, they read it 

" All are but parts of one stupendous Hull ! " 
-Every person's feelings have a front- 



door and a side-door by which they may be en- 
tered. The front-door is on the street. Some 
keep it always open; some keep it latched; 
some, locked; some, bolted, — with a chain that 
will let you peep in, but not get in; and some 
nail it up, so that nothing can pass its thresh- 
old. This front-door leads into a passar;* 
which opens into an ante-room, and this inta 



134 THE AUTOCEAT OF THE 

the interior apartments. The side-door opens 
at once into the sacred chambers. 

There is ahnost always at least one key to 
this side-door. This is carried for years hidden 
in a mother's bosom. Fathers, brothers, sisters, 
and friends, often, but by no means so uni- 
Yersally, have duplicates of it. The wedding- 
ring conveys a right to one; alas, if none is 
given with it! 

If nature or accident has put one of these 
keys into the hands of a person who has the 
torturing instinct, I can only solemnly pro- 
nounce the words that Justice utters over its 
doomed victim, — The Lord have mercy on your 
soul! You will probably go mad within a 
reasonable time, — or, if you are a man, run o2 
and die with your head on a curb-stone, in 
Melbourne or San Francisco, — or, if you are a 
woman, quarrel and break your heart, or turn 
into a pale, jointed petrifaction that moves 
about as if it were alive, or play some real life- 
tragedy or other. 

Be very careful to whom you trust one of 
these keys of the side-door. The fact of pos- 
sessing one renders those even who are dear to 
you very terrible at times. You can keep the 
world out from your front-door, or receive vis- 
itors only when you are ready for them; but 
those of your own flesh and blood, or of cer- 
tain grades of intimacy, can come in at the 
side-door, if they will, at any hour and in any 
mood. Some of them have a scale of your 
whole nervous system, and can play all the 
^amut of your sensibilities in semitones, — ■ 
touching the naked nerve - pulps as a pian- 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 135 

ist strikes the keys of his instrument. I 
am satisfied that there are as great masters of 
this nerve-pla}dng as A^ieuxtemps or Thalberg 
in their lines of performance. Married Hfe is 
the school in which the most accomplished 
artists in this department are found. A deli- 
cate woman is the best instrument; she has such 
a magnificent compass of sensibilities! From 
the deep inward moan which follows pressure on 
the great nerves of rights to the sharp cry as 
the filaments of taste are struck with a crash- 
ing sweep, is a range which no other instru- 
ment possesses. A few exercises on it daily at 
home fit a man wonderfully for his habitual 
labors, and refresh him immensely as he re- 
turns from them. No stranger can get a great 
many notes of torture out of the human soul; 
it takes one that knows it well, — parent, child, 
brother, sister, intimate. Be very careful to 
whom you give a side-door key; too many have 
them already. 

You remember the old story of the ten- 
der-hearted man, who placed a frozen viper in 
his bosom, and was stung by it when it became 
thawed? If we take a cold-blooded creature 
into our bosom, better that it should sting us 
and we should die than that its chill should 
slowly steal into our hearts; warm it we never 
can! I have seen faces of women that were 
fair to look upon, yet one could see that the 
icicles were forming round these women's 
hearts. I knew what freezing image lay on the 
white breasts beneath the laces! 

A ver}" simple iiitclledvnl mechanism answers 
the necessities of friendship, and even of the 



136 THE AUTOCKAT OF THE 

most intimate relations of life. If a watch telle 
lis the hour and the minute, we can be content 
to carry it about with us for a life-time, though 
it has no second-hand and is not a repeater, nor 
a musical watch, — though it is not enameled 
nor jeweled, — in short, though it has little be- 
yond the wheels required for a trustworthy in- 
strument, added to a good face and a pair of 
useful hands. The more wheels there are in a 
watch or a brain, the more trouble they are ta 
take care of. The movements of exaltation 
which belong to genius are egotistic by their 
very nature. A calm, clear mind, not subject 
to the spasms or crises that are so often met 
with in creative or intensely perceptive natures,, 
is the best basis for love or friendship. — Ob- 
serve, I am talking about minds. I won't say,, 
the more intellect, the less capacity for loving; 
for that would do wrong to the understand- 
ing and reason; — but, on the other hand, that 
the brain often runs away with the heart's best 
blood, which gives the world a few pages of 
wisdom or sentiment or poetry; instead of mak- 
ing one other heart happy, I have no question. 

If one's intimate in love or friendship can- 
not or does not share all one's intellectual 
tastes or pursuits, that is a small matter. 
Intellectual companions can be found easily in 
men and books. After all, if we think of it, 
most of the world's loves and friendships have 
been between people that could not read nor 
spell. 

But to radiate the heat of the affections into 
a clod, which absorbes all that is poured into 
it, but never warms beneath the sunshine of 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 137 

smiles or the pressure of hand or lip, — this is 
the great martyrdom of sensitive beings, — most 
of all in that perpetual auto da fe where young 
womanhood is the sacrifice. 

You noticed, perhaps, what I just said 

about the loves and friendships of illiterate 
persons, — that is, of the human race, with a 
few exceptions here and there. I like books, — 
I was born and bred among them, and have the 
easy feeling, when I get into their presence, 
that a stable-boy has among horses. I don't 
think I undervalue them either as companions 
or as instructors. But I can't help remember- 
ing that the world's great men have not com- 
monly been great scholars, nor its great scholars 
great men. The Hebrew patriarchs had snmll 
libraries, I think, if any; yet they represent to 
our imaginations a very complete idea of man- 
hood, and, I think, if we could ask in Abra- 
ham to dine with us men of letters next Satur- 
day, we should feel honored by his company. 

What I wanted to say about books is this: 
that there are times in which every active mind 
feels itself above any and all human books. 

1 think a man must have a good opinion 

of himself, Sir, — said the divinity-student, — 
who should feel himself above Shakspeare at 
any time. 

My young friend, — I replied, — the man wlio 
is never conscious of any state of feeling 
or of intellectual effort entirely beyond expres- 
sion by any form of words whatsoever is a mere 
creature of language. I can hardly believe 
there are any such men. Why, think for a 
moment of the power of music. The nerves 



13S THE AUTOCItAT OF THE 

that make ns alive to it spread out (so the Pro- 
fessor tells me) in the most sensitive region oi 
the marrow just where it is widening to run 
upward into the hemispheres. It has its seat 
in the region of sense rather than of thought. 
Yet it produces a continuous and, as it were, 
logical sequence of emotional and intellectual 
changes; but how different from trains of 
thought proper! how entirely beyond the reach 
of symbols! — Think of human passions as com- 
pared with all phrases! Did you ever hear of a 
man's growing lean by the reading of " Romeo 
and Juliet," or blowing his brains out because 
Desdemona was malinged? There are a good 
many symbols, even, that are more expressive 
than words. I remember a young wife who had 
to part with her husband for a time. She did 
not write a mournful poem; indeed, she was a 
silent person, and perhaps hardly said a word 
about it; but she quietly turned of a deep orange 
color with jaundice. A great many people in 
this world have but one form of rhetoric for 
their profoundest experiences, — namely, to 
waste away and die. When a man can read, his 
paroxysm of feeling is passing. When he can 
read, his thought has slackened its hold. — You 
talk about reading Shakspeare, using him as an 
expression for the highest intellect, and you 
wonder that any common person should be so 
presumptuous as to suppose his thought can 
rise above the text which lies before him. But 
think a moment. A child's reading of Shaks- 
peare is one thing, and Coleridge's or Schlegel's 
reading of him is another. The saturation- 
point of each mind differs from that of every 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 139 

jther. But I think it is as true for the small 
mind which can only take up a little as for the 
gi'cat one which takes up much, that the sug- 
gested trains of thought and feeling ought 
ahvays to rise above — not the author, but the 
reader's mental version of the author, whoever 
he may be. 

I think most readers of Shakspeare some- 
times find themselves throw^n into exalted men- 
tal conditions like those produced by music. 
Then they may drop the book, to pass at once 
into the region of thought without words. We 
may happen to be very dull folks, you and I, 
and probably are, unless there is some particu- 
lar reason to suppose the contrary. But we get 
glimpses now and then of a sphere of spiritual 
possibilities, where we, dull as we are now, may 
sail in vast circles round the largest compass of 
earthly intelligences. 

1 confess there are times when I feel 

like the friend I mentioned to you some time 
ago, — I hate the very sight of a book. Some- 
times it becomes almost a physical necessity to 
talk out what is in the mind before putting 
anything else into it. It is very bad to have 
thoughts and feelings, which were meant to 
come out in talk, strike in, as they say of some 
complaints that ought to show outwardly. 

I always believed in life rather than in books. 
I suppose every day of earth, with its hundred 
thousand deaths and something more of births, 
— v.'ith its loves and hates, its triumphs and de- 
feats, its pangs and blisses, has more of 
humanity in it than all the books that were ever 
written, put together. I believe the flowers 



140 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

growing at this moment send up more fragrance 
to heaven than was ever exhaled from all the 
essences ever distilled. 

Don^t I read up various matters to talk 

about at this table or elsewhere? — No, that is 
the last thing I would do. . I will tell you my 
rule. Talk about those subjects you have had 
long in your mind, and listen to what others 
say about subjects you have studied but re- 
cently. Knowledge and timber shouldn't be 
much used till they are seasoned. 

Physiologists and metaphysicians have 

had their attention turned a good deal of late 
to the automatic and involuntary actions of the 
mind. Put an idea into your intelligence and 
leave it there an hour, a day, a year, without 
ever having occasion to refer to it. When, at 
last, you return to it, you do not find it as it was 
when acquired. It has domiciliated itself, so 
to speak, — become at home, — entered into re- 
lations with your other thoughts, and integrated 
itself with the whole fabric of the mind. — Or 
take a simple and familiar example. You for- 
get a name, in conversation, — go on talking, 
without making any effort to recall it, — and 
presently the mind evolves it by its own invol- 
untary and unconscious action, while you were 
pursuing another train of thought, and the 
name rises of itself to your lips. 

There are some curious observations I should 
like to make about the mental machinery, but 
I think we are getting rather didactic. 

1 should be gratified, if Benjamin Frank- 
lin would let me know something of his prog- 
ress in the French language. I rather liked 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 141 

that exercise he read us the other day, though 
I must confess I should hardly dare to translate 
it, for fear some people in a remote city where I 
once lived might think I was drawing their 
portraits. 

Yes, Paris is a famous place for societies. 

I don't know whether the piece I mentioned 
from the French author was intended simply as 
Natural History, or whether there was not a 
little malice in his description. At any rate, 
when I gave my translation to B. F. to turn 
back again into French, one reason was that I 
thought it w^ould sound a little bald in Eng- 
lish, and some people might think it was meant 
to have some local bearing or other, — which the 
author, of course, didn't mean, inasmuch as he 
could not be acquainted with anything on this 
side the water. 

[The above remarks were addressed to the 
schoolmistress, to whom I handed the paper 
-after looking it over. The divinity-student 
came and read over her shoulder, — very curious, 
apparently, but his eyes w^andered, I thought. 
Seeing that her breathing was a little hurried 
and high, or thoracic, as my friend, the Pro- 
fessor, calls it, I watched her a little more 
closely. — It is none of my business. — After all, 
it is the imponderables that move the world, — • 
heat, electricity, love. — Hadet.] 

This is the piece that Benjamin Franklin 
made into boarding-school French, such as you 
see here; don't expect too much; — the mistakes 
give a relish to it, I think. 



142 THE AUTOCKAT OF THE 



LES SOCIETES POLYPHYSIOPHILOSO- 
PHIQUES. 

Ces societes la sont une Institution pour sup- 
pleer aux besoins d'esprit et de coeur de ces 
individus qui ont survecu a leurs emotions a 
le'g-ard du beau sexe, et qui n'ont pas la distrac- 
tion de I'habitude de boire. 

Pour devenir membre d'une de ces Societes, on 
doit avoir le moins de cheveuz possible. S'il y en 
reste plusieurs qui resistent aux depilatoires 
naturelles et autres, on doit avoir quelques con- 
naissances, n'importe dans vuel' genre. Des le 
moment qu'on ouvre la porte de la Societe, an 
a un grand interet dans toutes les choses dont 
on ne salt rien. Ainsi, un microscopiste de 
montre un nouveau flexor du tarse d'un melo- 
lontlia vulgaris. Douze savans improvises, portans 
des besides, et qui ne connaissent rien des 
insectes, si ce n'est les morsures du culex, se pre- 
cip-LoCnt sur Finstrument, et voient — une grande 
bulle d'air, dont ils s'emerveillent avec effusion. 
Ce qui est un spectacle plein d'instruction — pour 
ceux qui ne sont pas de ladite Societe. Tous leS 
membres regardent les cliimistes en particulier 
avec un air d'intelligence j)arfaite pendant qu'ils 
prouvent dans un discours d'une demiheure que 
Q6 jv^s JJ5 Qi5 Q^Q fQj^i- qi^ialque chose qui n'est 
bonne a rien, mais qui probablement a une odeur 
tres desagreable, selon I'habitude des produits 
chimiques. Apres cela vient im mathematicien 
qui vous bourre avec des a-\-b et vous rapporte 
enfin un x-\-y, dont vous n'aves pas besoin et qui 
ne change nullement vos relations avec la vie. 
Un naturaliste vous parle des formations speciales 
des animaux excessivement inconnus, don't vous 
n'avez jamais soupconne I'existence. Ainsi il 
vous decrit les follicules de Vappeudix vermiformis 
d'un dzigguetai. Vous ne savez pas ce que c'est 
qu'un folUcule. Yons nc savez j)as ce que c'est 
qu'ini appevdlv veri formic. Vous n'avez jamais 
entendu parler du dzigguetai. Ainsi vous gagnez 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 143 

toutes ces connaissances a la fois, qui s'attachent 
a votre esprit comme I'eau adhere aux plumes 
d'un canard. On connait toutes les langues ex 
officio en devenant membre d'une de ces Societes. 
Ainsi quand on entend lire un Essai sur les dia- 
lectes Tchutchiens, on comprend tout cela de 
suite, et s'instruit enormement. 

II y a deux especes d'individus qu'on trouve tou- 
jours a ces Societes: 1" Le membre a questions; 
2" Le membre a " Bylaws." 

La question est une specialite. Celus qui en fait 
metier ne fait jamais def reponses. La question 
est une maniere tres commode de dire les choses 
suivantes: " Me voila! Je ne suis pas fossil, moi, 
• — je respire encore! J'ai des idees, — voyez mon 
intelligence! Vous ne croyiez pas, vous autres, 
que je savais quelque chose de cela! Ah, nous 
avons un peu de sagacite, voj^ez vous! Nous ne 
sommes nullement la bete qu'on pense! " — Le 
faiscus de questions donne peu d'attention auae 
reponses qu'on fait; ce n'est pas la dans sa specialite. 

Le membre a " Bylaws " est le bouchon de 
toutes les emotions mousseuses et genereuses qui 
se montrent dans la Societe. C'est un empereur 
manque, — un tyran a la troisieme trituration. 
C'est un esprit dur, borne, exact, grand dans les 
petitesses, petit dans les grandeurs, selon le mot 
du g'rand Jefferson. On ne I'aime pas dans la 
Societe, mais on le respecte et on le craint. II 
n'y a qu'un mot pour ce membre audessus de 
" Bylaws." Ce mot est pour lui ce que I'Om est 
aux Hindous. C'est sa religion; il n'y a rien 
audela. Ce mot la c'est la Constitution! 

Lesdites Societes publient des feuilletons de 
terns en terns. On les trouve abandonnes a sa 
porte, nus comme des enfans nouveaunes, faute 
de membrane cutanee, ou meme papyracee. Si 
on aime la botanique, on y trouve une memoire 
sur les coquilles; si on fait des etudes zoolo- 
giques, on trouve un grand tas de q' 4/— 1, ce qui 
doit etre infiniment plus commode que les ency- 
clopedies. Ainsi il est clair comme la metaphy- 



144 THE AUTOCEAT OF THE 

sique qu'on doit devenir membre d'une Societe 
telle que nous decrivons. 

Recette pour le Depilatoire Physiopliilosopliique. 

Chaux vive lb. ss. Eau bouillante Oj. 

Depilez avec. Polissez eiisuite. 

1 told the boy that his translation into 

French was creditable to him; and some of the 
company wishing to hear what there was in the 
piece that made me smile^ I turned it into Eng- 
lish for them, as well as I conld, on the spot. 

The landlady's daughter seemed to be much 
amused by the idea that a depilatory could take 
the place of literary and scientific accomplish- 
ments; she wanted me to print the piece, so that 
she might send a copy of it to her cousin in 
Mizzourah; she didn't think he'd have to do 
anything to the outside of his head to get into 
any of the societies; he had to wear a wig once, 
when he played a part in a tabullo. 

No, — said I, — I shouldn't think of printing 
that in English. I'll tell you why. As soon 
as you get a few thousand people together in a 
town, there is somebody that every sharp thing 
you say is sure to hit. What if a thing w^as 
written in Paris or in Pekin? — that makes no 
difference. Everybody in those cities, or almost 
everybody, has his counterpart here, and in all 
large places. — You never studied averages, as 
I have had occasion to. 

I'll tell you how I came to know so much 
about averages. There was one season when I 
was lecturing, commonly, five evenings in the 
week, through most of the lecturing period. I 
soon found, as most speakers do, that it was 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 145 

pleasanter to work one lecture than to keep 
several in hand. 

Don't you get sick to death of one lec- 
ture? — said the landlady's daughter, — who had 
a new dress on that day, and was in spirits for 
conversation. 

I was going to talk about averages, — I said, 
— but I have no objection to telling you about 
lecturers, to begin with. 

A new lecture always has a certain excite- 
ment connected with its delivery. One thinks 
well of it, as of most things fresh from his mind. 
After a few deliveries of it, one gets tired and 
then disgusted with its repetition. Go on de- 
livering it, and the disgust passes off, until, 
after one has repeated it a hundred or a hun- 
dred and fifty times, he rather enjoys the 
hundred and first or hundred and fifty-first 
time, before a new audience. But this is 
on one condition, — that he never lays the 
lecture down and lets it cool. If he does, there 
comes on a loathing for it which is intense, so 
that the sight of the old battered manuscript 
is as bad as sea-sickness. 

A new lecture is just like any other new tool. 
We use it for a while with pleasure. Then it 
blister our hands, and we hate to touch it. By 
and by our hands get callous, and then we have 
no longer any sensitiveness about it. But if 
we give it up, the calluses disappear; and if 
we meddle with it again, we miss the novelty 
and get the blisters. — The story is often quoted 
of Whitefield, that he said a sermon was 
good for nothing until it had been preached 
forty times. A lecture doesn't begin to be old 



146 THE AUTOCKAT OF THE 

until it has passed its hundredth delivery; and 
isome;, I think, have doubled, if not quadrupled, 
that number. These old lectures are a man's 
best, commonly; they improve by age, also, — 
like the pipes, fiddles, and poems 1 told you 
of the other day. One learns to make the most 
of their strong points and to carry off their 
weak ones, — to take out the really good things 
which don't tell on the audience, and put in 
cheaper things that do. All this degrades him, 
of course, but it improves the lecture for gen- 
eral delivery. A thoroughly popular lecture 
ought to have nothing in it which five hun- 
dred people cannot all take in a flash, just as it 
is uttered. 

No, indeed, — I should be very sorry to 

say anything disrespectful of audiences. I 
iiave been kindly treated by a great many, and 
may occasionally face one hereafter. But I tell 
you the average intellect of five hundred per- 
sons, taken as they come, is not very high. It 
may be sound and safe, so far as it goes, but it 
is not very rapid or profound. A lecture ought 
to be something which all can understand, 
about something which interests everybody. I 
think, that, if any experienced lecturer gives 
you a different account from this, it will proba- 
bly be one of those eloquent or forcible speak- 
ers who hold an audience by the charm of their 
manner, whatever they talk about, — even when 
they don't talk very well. 

But an average, which was what I meant to 
speak about, is one of the most extraordinary 
subjects of observation and study. It is awful 
in its uniformity, in its automatic necessity of 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 147 

action. Two communities of ants or bees are 
exactly alike in all their actions^, so far as we can 
see. Two Ij^ceum assemblies, of five hundred 
each, are so nearly alike, that they are abso- 
lutely undistinguishable in many cases by any 
definite mark, and there is nothing but the place 
and time by which one can tell the " remark- 
ably intelligent audience " of a town in New 
York or Ohio from one in any New England 
town of similar size. Of course, if any princi- 
ple of selection has come in, as in those special 
associations of young men which are common 
in cities, it deranges the uniformity of the 
assemblage. But let there be no such interfer- 
ing circumstances, and one knows pretty well 
even the look the audience will have, before 
he goes in. Front seats: a few old folks, — 
shiny-headed, — slant up best ear toward the 
speaker, — drop off asleep after a while, when 
the air begins to get a little narcotic with car- 
bonic acid. Bright women's faces, young and 
middle-aged, a little behind these, but toward 
the front — (pick out the best, and lecture 
mainly to that). Here and there a countenance 
sharp and scholarlike, and a dozen pretty 
female ones sprinkled about. An indefinite 
number of pairs of young people, — happy, but 
not always very attentive. Boys in the back- 
ground, more or less quiet. Dull faces, here, 
there, — in how many places! I don't say dull 
people, but faces without a ray of sympathy or 
a movement of expression. They are what kill 
the lecturer. These negative faces with their 
vacuous eyes and stony linen raents pump and 
suck the warm soul out of liim: — that is the 



148 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

chief reason why lecturers grow so pale before 
the season is over. They render latejit any 
amount of vital caloric; they act on our minds 
as those cold-blooded creatures I was talking 
about act on our hearts. 

Out of all these inevitable elements the 
audience is generated, — a great compound 
vertebrate, as much like fifty others you have 
seen as any two mammals of the same species 
are like each other. Each audience laughs, and 
each cries, in just the same places of your lec- 
ture; that is, if you make one laugh or cry, you 
make all. Even those little indescribable move- 
ments which a lecturer takes cognizance of, 
just as a driver notices his horse's cocking his 
ears, are sure to come in exactly the same place 
of your lecture, always. I declare to you, that, 
as the monk said about the picture in the con- 
vent, — that he sometimes thought the living 
tenants were the shadows, and the painted fig- 
ures the realities, — I have sometimes felt as if 
I were a wandering spirit, and this great un- 
changing multivertebrate which I faced night 
after night was one ever-listening animal, which 
writhed along after me wherever I fled, and 
coiled at my feet every evening, turning up to 
me the same sleepless eyes which I thought I 
had closed with my last drowsy incantation! 

Oh, yes! A thousand kindly and 

courteous acts, — a thousand faces that melted 
individually out of my recollection as the April 
snow melts, but only to steal away and find the 
ber'-; of flowers whose roots are memory, but 
which blossom in poetry and dreams. I am not 
xmgTateful nor unconscious of all the good feel- 



BREAKFASL TABLE. 149 

ing and intelligence everywhere to be met with 
through the vast parish to which the lecturer 
ministers. But when I set forth, leading a 
string of my mind's daughters to market, as the 
country-folk fetch in their strings of horses 

Pardon me, that was a coarse fellow who 

sneered at the sympathy wasted on an unhappy 
lecturer, as if, because he was decently paid for 
his services, he had therefore sold his sensi- 
bilities. — Family men get dreadfully home- 
sick. In the remote and bleak village the heart 
returns to the red blaze of the logs in one's fire- 
place at home. 

•' There are his young- barbarians all at play," — 

if he owns any youthful savages. — No, the world 
has a million roots for a man, but only one 
rest. 

It is a fine thing to be an oracle to which 

an appeal is always made in all discussions. 
The men of facts wait their turn in grim silence, 
with that slight tension about the nostrils 
which the consciousness of carrying a " settler " 
in the form of a fact or a revolver gives the indi- 
vidual thus armed. When a person is really 
full of information, and does not abuse it to 
crush conversation, his part is to that of the 
real talkers what the instrumental accompani- 
ment is in a trio or quartette of vocalists. 

What do I mean by the real talkers? — 

vVhy, the people with fresh ideas, of course, and 
plenty of good warm words to dress them in. 
t'acts always yield tlie place of honor, in conver- 
i^ation, to thouglits rJ,;cLit facts; but if a false 



150 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

note is uttered, down comes the finger on the 
key and the man of facts asserts his true dig- 
nity. I have l-cnown three of these men of 
facts, at least, who were always formidable, — 
and one of them was tyrannical. 

Yes, a man sometimes makes a grand 

appearance on a particular occasion; but these 
men knew something about almost everything, 
and never made mistakes. — He? Vefieers in first- 
rate style. The mahogany scales off now and 
then in spots, and then you see the cheap light 

stuff. I found very fine in conversational 

information, the other day, when we were in 
company. The talk ran upon mountains. He 
was wonderfully well acquainted with the lead- 
ing facts about the Andes, the Apennines, and 
the A23palachians; he had nothing in particular 
to say about Ararat, Ben Nevis, and various 
other mountains that were mentioned. By and 
b}^ some Eevolutionary anecdote came up, and 
he showed singular familiarity with the lives 
of the Adamses, and gave many details relating 
to Major Andre. A point of Natural History 
being suggested, he gave an excellent account 
of the air-bladder of fishes. He was very full 
upon the subject of agriculture, but retired 
from the conversation when horticulture was 
introduced in the discussion. So he seemed 
well acquainted with the geology of anthracite, 
but did not pretend to know anything of other 
kinds of coal. There was something so odd 
about the extent and limitations of his knowl- 
edge, that I suspected all at once what might 
be the meaning of it, and waited till I got an 
opportunity. — Have you seen the " New 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 151 

American Cyclopa9dia " ? said I. — I have, he re- 
plied, I received an early copy. — How far does 
it go? — He turned red, and answered, — To 
Araguay. — Oh, said I, to myself, not quite so 
far as Ararat; — that is the reason he knew noth- 
ing about it; but he must have read all the rest 
straight through, and, if he can remember what 
is in this volume until he has read all those 
that are to come, he will know more than I 
ever thought he would. 

Since I had this experience, I hear that some- 
body else has related a similar story. I didn't 
borrow it, for all that. — I made a comparison 
at table some time since, which has often been 
quoted and received many compliments. It 
was that of the mind of a bigot to the pupil 
of the eye; the more light you pour on it, the 
more it contracts. The simile is a very obvious, 
and, I suppose I may now say, a happy one, for 
it has just been shown me that it occurs in a 
Preface to certain Political Poems of Thomas 
Moore's, published long before my remark was 
repeated. When a person of fair character for 
literary honesty uses an image such as another 
has employed before him, the presumption is, 
that he has struck upon it independently, or 
unconsciously recalled it, supposing it his own. 

It is impossible to tell, in a great many cases, 
whether a comparison which suddenly sug- 
gests itself is a new conception or a recollec- 
tion. I told you the other day that I never 
wrote a line of verse that seemed to me com- 
paratively good, but it appeared old at once, 
and often as if it had been borrowed. But I 
confess I never suspected the above comparison 



152 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

of being old^ except from the fact of its obvious- 
ness. It is proper, however, that I proceed by 
a formal instrument to rehnquish all claim to 
any property in an idea given to the world at 
about the time when I had just joined the class 
in which Master Thomas Moore was then a 
somewhat advanced scholar. 

I, therefore, in full possession of my native 
honesty, but knowing the liability of all men 
to be elected to public office, and for that rea- 
son feeling uncertain how soon I may be in 
danger of losing it, do hereby renounce all 
claim to being considered the first person who 
gave utterance to a certain simile or comparison 
referred to in the accompanying documents, and 
relating to the pupil of the eye on the one part 
and the mind of the bigot on the other. I 
hereby relinquish all glory and profit, and es- 
pecially all claims to letters from autograph 
collectors, founded upon my supposed property 
in the above comparison, — knowing well, that^ 
according to the laws of literature, they who 
speak first hold the fee of the thing said. I do 
also agree that all Editors of Cyclopedias and 
Biographical Dictionaries, all Publishers of 
Eeviews and Papers, and all Critics writing 
therein, shall be at liberty to retract or qualify 
any opinion predicated on the supposition that 
I was the sole and undisputed author of the 
above comparison. But, inasmuch as I do 
afRrm that the comparison aforesaid was uttered 
by me in the firm belief that it was new and 
wholly my own, and as I have good reason to 
think that I had never seen or heard it when 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 153 

first expressed by me, and as it is well known 
that different persons may independently utter 
the same idea, — as is evinced by that familiar 
iine from Donatus, — 

" Pereant illi qui ante nos nostra dixerunt," — 

now, therefore, I do request by this instrument 
that all well-disposed persons will abstain from 
asserting or implying that I am open to any 
accusation whatsoever touching the said com- 
parison, and, if they have so asserted or implied, 
that they will have the manliness forthwith to 
retract the same assertion or insinuation. 

I think few persons have a greater disgust 
for plagiarism than myself. If I had even sus- 
pected that the idea in question was borrowed, 
I should have disclaimed originality, or men- 
tioned the coincidence, as I once did in a case 
where I happened to hit on an idea of Swift's. 
— But what shall I do about these verses I was 
going to read you? I am afraid that half man- 
kind would accuse me of stealing their thoughts, 
if I printed them. I am convinced that sev- 
eral of you, especially if you are getting a little 
on in life, will recognize some of these senti- 
ments as having passed through your conscious- 
ness at some time. I can't help it, — it is too 
late now. The verses are written, and you must 
have them. Listen, then, and you shall hear 

WHAT WE ALL THINK. 

That ag-e was older once than now, 

In spite of locks untimely shed, 
Or silvered on the youthful brow; 

That babes make love and children wed. 



154 THE AUTOCKAT OF THE 

That sunshine had a heavenly glow, 

Which faded with those " good old days," 

When winters came with a deeper snow 
And autumns with a softer haze. 

That — mother, sister, wife, or child — 
The " best of women " each has known. 

Were schoolboys ever half so wild? 
How young the grandpapas have grown? 

That but for this our souls were free. 
And but for that our lives were blest; 

That in some season yet to be 

Our cares will leave us time to rest. 

Whene'er we groan with ache or pain. 
Some common ailment of the race, — 

Though doctors think the matter plain,— 
That ours is " a peculiar case." 

That when like babes with fingers burned 
We count one bitter maxim more. 

Our lesson all the world has learned, 
And men are wiser than before. 

That when we sob o'er fancied woes, 

The angels hovering overhead 
Count every pitying drop that flows, 

And love us for the tears we shed. 

That when we stand with tearless eye 
And turn the beggar from our door, 

They still approve us when we sigh, 
" Ah, had I but ohg thousand more! " 

That weakness smoothed the path of sin,. 
In half the slips our youth has known; 

And whatsoe'er its blame has been. 

That Mercy flowers on faults outgrown. 

Though temples crowd the crumbled brinlv 
O'erhanging truth's eternal flow, 

Their tablets hold with ichat icc think, ' 

Their echoes dumb to what we know: 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 155 

That one unquestioned text we read, 

All doubt beyond, all fear above, 
Nor crackling pile nor cursing creed 

Can burn or blot it: God is Love! 



VII. 



[This particular record is noteworthy princi - 
pally for containing a paper by my friend, the 
Professor, with a poem or two annexed or inter- 
calated. I would suggest to young persons 
that they should pass over it for the present, 
and read, instead of it, that story about the 
young man who was in love with the young 
lady, and in great trouble for something like 
nine pages, but happily married on the tenth 
page or thereabouts, which, I take it for 
granted, will be contained in the periodical 
where this is found, unless it differ from all 
other publications of the kind. Perhaps, if 
such young people will lay the number aside, 
and take it up ten years, or a little more, from 
the present time, they may find something in 
it for their advantage. They can't possibly 
understand it all now.] 

My friend, the Professor, began talking with 
me one day in a dreary sort of way. I 
couldn't get at the difficulty for a good while, 
but at last it turned out that somebody had 
been calling him an old man. — He didn't mind 
his students calling him the old man, he said. 
That v/as a technical expression, and he thought 
that he remembered hearing it applied to him- 
self when he was about twenty-five. It may be 
considered as a familiar and sometimes endear- 



156 THE AUTOCKAT OF THE 

ing appellation. An Irishwoman calls her hus- 
band "the old man," and he returns the 
caressing expression by speaking of her as " the 
old woman." But now, said he, just suppose 
a case like one of these. A young stranger is 
overheard talking of you as a very nice old 
gentleman. A friendly and genial critic 
speaks of your green old age as illustrating the 
truth of some axiom you have uttered with 
reference to that period of life. What I call an 
old man is a person with a smooth, shining 
crown and a fringe of scattered white hairs, 
seen in the streets on sunshiny days, stooping 
as he walks, bearing a cane, moving cautiously 
and slowly; telling old stories, smiling at 
present follies, living in a narrow world of dry 
habits; one that remains waking when others 
have dropped asleep, and keeps a little night- 
lamp-flame of life burning year after year, if 
the lamp is not upset, and there is only a care- 
ful hand held round it to prevent the puffs of 
wind from blowing the flame out. That's what 
I call an old man. 

Now, said the Professor, you don't mean to 
tell me that I have got to that yet? Why, bless 
you, I am several years short of the time when — 
[I knew what was coming, and could hardly 
keep from laughing; twenty years ago he used to 
quote it as one of those absurd speeches men of 
genius will make, and now he is going to argue 
from it] — several years short of the time when 
Balzac says that men are — most — you know — 
dan,2:erous to — the hearts of — in short, most to 
be dreaded by duennas that have charge of sus- 
ceptible females. — What age is that? said I, sar< 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 157 

castically. — Fifty-two years, answered the 
Professor. — Balzac ought to know, said I, if it 
is true that Goethe said of him that each of his 
stories must have been dug out of a woman's 
heart. But fifty-two is a high tigure. 

Stand in the light of the window, Professor, 
said I. — The Professor took up the desired 
position. — You have white hairs, I said. — Had 
'em any time these twenty years, said the Pro- 
fessor. — And the crow's-foot, — pes anserinus, 
rather. — The Professor smiled, as I wanted him 
to, and the folds radiated like the ridges of a 
half-opened fan, from the outer corner of the 
eyes to the temples. — And the calipers, said I. 
— What are the calipers? he asked, curiously. 
— Why, the parenthesis, said I. — Parenthesis? 
said the Professor; what's that? — W^hy, look in 
the glass when you are disposed to laugh, and 
see if your mouth isn't framed in a couple of 
crescent lines, — so, my boy ( ). — It's all non- 
sense, said the Professor; just look at my biceps; 
— and he began pulling off his coat to show me 
his arm. — Be careful, said I; you can't bear ex- 
posure to the air, at your time of life, as you 
could once. — I will box with you, said the Pro- 
fessor, row with you, walk with you, ride with 
you, swim with you, or sit at table with you, 
for fifty dollars a side. — Pluck survives stam- 
ina, I answered. 

The Professor went off a little out of humor. 
A few weeks afterward he came in, looking very 
good-natured, and brought me a paper, v,^hich I 
have here, and from which I shall read you some 
portions, if you don't object. He had been 
Thinking the matter over, he said, — had read 



158 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

Cicero '^ De Senectute/' and made up his mind 
to meet old age halfway. These were some of 
his reflections that he had written down; so here 
you have 

THE PKOFESSOR'S PAPEK. 

There is no doubt when old age begins. 
The human body is a furnace which keeps in 
blast three score years and ten, more or less. 
It burns about three hundred pounds of carbon 
a year, (besides other fuel,) when in fair work- 
ing order, according to a great chemist's esti- 
mate. When the fire slackens, life declines; 
when it goes out, we are dead. 

It has been shown by some noted French ex- 
perimenters, that the amount of combustion 
increases up to about the thirtieth year, remains 
stationary to about forty-five, and then dimin- 
ishes. This last is the point where old age 
starts from. The great fact of physical life is 
the perpetual commerce with the elements, and 
the fire is the measure of it. 

About this time of life, if food is plenty where 
you live, — for that, you know, regulates matri- 
mony, — you may be expecting to find yourself 
a grandfather some fine morning; a kind of 
domestic felicity that gives one a cool shiver of 
delight to think of, as among the not remotely 
possible events. 

I don't mind much those slipshod lines Dr. 
Johnson wrote to Thrale, telling her about 
life's declining from thirtjj-five; the furnace is 
in full blast for ten years longer, as I have said. 
The Ronians came very near the mark; their 



BREAKFAST TxVBLE. 159< 

age of enlistment reached from seventeen t© 
forty-six years. 

What is the use of fighting against the sea- 
sons, or the tides, or the movements of the 
planetary bodies, or this ebb in the wave of life 
that flows through us? We are old fellows from 
the moment the fire begins to go out. Let us 
always behave like gentlemen when we are in- 
troduced to new acquaintance. 

Incipit Allegoria Senedutis. 

Old Age, this is Mr. Professor; Mr. Professor^, 
this is Old Age. 

Old Age. — Mr. Professor, I hope to see you 
well. I have known you for some time, though 
I think you did not know me. Shall we walk 
down the street together? 

Professor (drawing back a little). — We can 
talk more quietly, perhaps, in my study. Will 
you tell me how it is you seem to be acquainted 
with everybody you are introduced to, though 
he evidently considers you an entire stranger? 

Old Age. — I make it a rule never to force my- 
self upon a person's recognition until I have 
known him at least five years. 

Professor. — Do you mean to say that you have 
known me so long as that? 

Old Age. — I do. I left my card on you 
longer ago than that, but I am afraid you never 
read it; yet I see you have it with you. 

Professor. — Where ? 

Old Age. — There, between your eyebrows, — 
three straight lines running up and down; all 
the probate courts know that token, — " Old 
Afi'e, his mark." Put vour forefinger on the 



160 THE AUTOCEAT OF THE 

inner end of one eyebrow, and your middle fin- 
ger on the inner end of the other eyebrow; now 
separate the fingers, and you will smooth out 
my sign-manual; that's the way you used to look 
before I left my card on you. 

Professor. — What message do people generally 
send back when you first call on them? 

Old Age. — Not at home. Then I leave a card 
and go. Next year I call; get the same answer; 
leave another card. So for five or six, — some- 
times ten years or more. At last, if they don't 
let me in, I break in through the front door or 
the windows. 

We talked together in tliis way some time. 
Then Old Age said again, — Come, let us walk 
down the street together, — and offered me a 
cane, an eye-glass, a tippet, and a pair of over- 
shoes. — No, much obliged to you, said I. I 
don't want those things, and I had a little 
rather talk with you here, privately, in my 
study. So I dressed myself up in a jaunty way 
and walked out alone; — got a fall, caught a 
cold, was laid up with a lumbago, and had time 
to think over this whole matter. 

Explicit AUegoria Senedutis. 

We have settled when old age begins. Like 
all Nature's processes, it is gentle and gradual 
in its approaches, strewed with illusions, and all 
its little griefs soothed by natural sedatives. 
But the iron hand is not less irresistible because 
it wears the velvet glove. The button-wood 
throws ofi^ its bark in large flakes, which one 
may find lying at its foot, pushed out, and at 
last pushed off, by that tranquil movement from 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 161 

beneath, which is too slow to be seen, but too 
powerful to be arrested. One finds them 
always, but one rarely sees them fall. So it is 
our youth drops from us, — scales off, sapless and 
lifeless, and lays bare the tender and immature 
fresh growth of old age. Looked at collect- 
ively, the changes of old age appear as a series 
of personal insults and indignities, terminating 
at last in death, which Sir Thomas Browne has 
called " the very disgrace and ignomy of our 
natures." 

My lady's cheek can boast no more 
The cranberry white and pink it wore; 
And where her shining" locks divide, 
The parting- line is all too wide 

No, no, — this will never do. Talk about men, 
if you will, but spare the poor women. 

We have a brief description of seven stages 
of life by a remarkably good observer. It is 
very presumptuous to attem.pt to add to it, yet I 
have been struck with the fact that life admits 
of a natural analysis into no less than fifteen 
distinct periods. Taking the five primary 
divisions, infancy, childhood, youth, manhood, 
old age, each of these has its own three periods 
of immaturity, complete development, and de- 
cline. I recognize an old baby at once, — with 
its "pipe and mug," (a stick of candy and a 
porringer,) — so does everybody; and an old 
child shedding its milk-teeth is only a little pro- 
totype of the old. man shedding his permanent 
ones. Fifty or thereabouts is only the child- 
hood, as it were, of old age; the graybeard 
youngster must be weaned from his late suppers 



102 THE AUTOCEAT OF THE 

now. So you will see that jou have to make 
fifteen stages at any rate, and that it would not 
be hard to make twenty-five; five primar}^, each 
with five secondary divisions. 

The infancy and childhood of commencing 
old age have the same ingenuous simplicity and 
delightful unconsciousness about them that the 
first stage of the earlier periods of life shows. 
The great delusion of mankind is in supposing 
that to be individual and exceptional which is 
universal and according to law. A person 
is always startled when he hears himself seri- 
ously called an old man for the first time. 

Nature gets us out of youth into manhood, 
as sailors are hurried on board of vessels, — in a 
state of intoxication. We are hustled into 
maturity reeling with our passions and imagina- 
tions, and w^e have drifted far away from port 
before we are awake out of our illusions. But 
to carry us out of maturity into old age, with- 
out our knowing where we are going, she drugs 
us with strong opiates, and so we stagger along 
with wide open eyes that see nothing until snow 
enough has fallen on our heads to rouse our 
comatose brains out of their stupid trances. 

There is one mark of age that strikes me 
more than any of the physical ones; — I mean 
the formation of Habits. An old man who 
shrinks into himself falls into ways that become 
as positive and as much beyond the reach of 
outside infiuences as if they were governed by 
clock-work. The animal functions, as the 
physiologists call them., in distinction from the 
organic, tend, in the process of deterioration to 
which age and neglect united gradually lead 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 16S 

them, to assume the periodical or rhythmical 
type of movement. Every man's heart (this, 
organ belongs, yon know, to the organic sys- 
tem) has a regular mode of action; but I know 
a great many men whose trains, and all their 
voluntary existence flowing from their brains, 
have a systole and diastole as regular as that of 
the heart itself. Habit is the approximation 
of the animal system to the organic. It is a 
confession of failure in the highest function of 
being, which involves a perpetual self-de- 
termination, in full view of all existing circum- 
stances. But habit, you see, is an action in. 
present circumstances from past motives. It 
is substituting a vis a tergo for the evolution of 
living force. 

When a man, instead of burning up three 
hundred pounds of carbon a year, has got down 
to two hundred and fifty, it is plain enough he 
must economize force somewhere. Now habit 
is a labor-saving invention which enables a man 
to get along with less fuel, — that is all; for fuel 
is force, you know, just as much in the page I 
am writing for you as in the locomotive or the 
legs that carry it to you. Carbon is the same 
thing, whether you call it wood, or coal, or bread 
and cheese. A reverend gentleman demurred 
to this statement, — as if, because combustion is 
asserted to be the sine qua nan of thought, 
therefore thought is alleged to be a purely 
chemical process. Facts of chemistry are one 
thing, I told him, and facts of consciousness 
another. It can be proved to him, by a very 
simple analysis of some of his spare elements^ 
that every Sunday, when he does his duty faith- 



164 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

fully, he uses up more phosphorus out of his 
brain and nerves than on ordinary days. 
But then lie had his choice whether to do his 
duty, or to neglect it, and save his phosphorus 
and other combustibles. 

It follows from all this that the formation of 
habits ought naturally to be, as it is, the special 
characteristic of age. As for the muscular 
powers, they pass their maximum long before 
the time when the true decline of life begins, 
if we may judge by the experience of the ring. 
A man is " stale," I think, in their language, 
soon after thirty, — often, no doubt, much 
earlier, as gentlemen of the pugilistic profession 
are exceedingly apt to keep their vital fire burn- 
ing ivith the hloiver up. 

So far without Tully. But in the mean- 
time I have been reading the treatise, " De 
Senectute." It is not long, but a leisurely per- 
formance. The old gentleman was sixty-three 
years of age when he addressed it to his friend 
T. Pomponius Atticus, Eq., a person of distinc- 
tion, some two or three years older. We read 
it when we are schoolboys, forget all about it 
for thirty years, and then take it up again by 
a natural instinct, — provided always that we 
read Latin as we drink water, without stopping 
to taste it, as all of us who ever learned it at 
school or college ought to do. 

Cato is the chief speaker in the dialogue. A 
good deal of it is what won Id be called in vulgar 
phrase " slow." It unpacks and unfolds inci- 
dental ilhistrntions which a modern writer 
would look at the hnek of,, nnd toss each to 
its pigeon-hole. I think nndent classics and 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 165 

ancient people are alike in the tendency to this 
kind of expansion. 

An old doctor came to me once (this is literal 
fact) with some contrivance or other for people 
with broken kneepans. As the patient would 
be confined for a good while, he might find it 
dull work to sit with his hands in his lap. 
Heading, the ingenious inventor suggested, 
would be an agreeable mode of passing the time. 
He mentioned, in his written account of his 
contrivance, various works that might amuse 
the wearv hour. I remember only three, — ■ 
"Don Quixote," "Tom Jones," and "Watts 
on the Mind." 

It is not generally understood that Cicero's 
essay was delivered as a lyceum lecture, {concio 
popularis,) at the Temple of Mercury. The 
journals (papyri) of the day (Tempora Quotid- 
iana, — Tribimus Quirinalis, — Prceco Roman- 
us, and the rest) gave abstracts of it, one of 
which I have translated and modernized, as 
being a substitute for the analysis I intended 
to make. 

IV. Kal. Mart . . . 

The lecture at the Temple of Mercury, last 
evening, was well attended by the elite of our 
great city. Two hundred thousand sestertia 
were thought to have been represented in the 
house. The doors were beseiged by a mob of 
shabby fellows (illotum vulgus,) who were at 
length quieted after two or three had been some- 
what roughly handled (gladio jugtdati). The 
speaker was the well-known Mark Tully, Eq., 
—the subject. Old Age. Mr. T. has a lean and 



166 THE AUTOCEAT OF THE 

scraggy person, with a very unpleasant ex< 
crescence upon liis nasal feature, from which 
Ms nickname of chick-pea (Cicero) is said by 
some to be derived. As a lecturer is public 
property, we may remark, that his outer gar- 
ment (toga) was of cheap stuff and somewhat 
worn, and that liis general style and appear- 
ance of dress and manner {habitus, vestitusque) 
were somewhat provincial. 

The lecture consisted of an imaginary dia- 
logue between Cato and Lselius. We found the 
iirst portion rather heav}^, and retired a few 
moments for refreshments {pocula qucedam 
mni). — All want to reach old age, says Cato, 
and grumble when they get it; therefore they 
are donkeys. — The lecturer will allow us to say 
that he is the donkey; we know we shall grum- 
ble at old age, but we want to live through 
youth and manhood, in spite of the troubles we 
shall groan over. — There was considerable pros- 
ing as to what old age can do and can't. — True, 
but not new. Certainly, old folks can't jump, 
— break the necks of their thigh bones, {femo- 
rum cervices,) if they do, can't crack nuts with 
their teeth; can't climb a greased pole {malum 
inunctum scandere non possunt); but they can 
tell old stories and give you good advice; if 
they know what you have made up your mind 
to do when you ask them. — All this is well 
>enough,but won't set the Tiber on ^re {Tiierim 
accendere nequaquam potest). 

There were some clever things enough, 
-{dicta huud inepta,) a few of which are worth 
reporting. — Old people are accused of being 
^forgetful; but they never forget where they 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 1G7 

have put their money. — Nobody is so old he 
doesn't think he can live a year. — The lecturer 
quoted an ancient maxim, — Grow old early, if 
you would be old long, — but disputed it. — Au- 
thority, he thought, was the chief privilege of 
age. — It is not great to have money, but fine to 
govern those that have it. — Old age begins at 
forty-six years according to the common 
opinion. — It is not every kind of old age or 
wine that grows sour with time. — Some ex- 
cellent remarks were made on immortality, but 
mainly borrowed from and credited to Plato. — 
Several pleasing anecdotes were told, — Old 
Milo, champion of the heavy weights in his day, 
looked at his arms and whimpered, " They are 
dead." Not so dead as you, you old fool, — says 
Cato; — you never were good for anything but 
for your shoulders and flanks. — Pisistratus 
asked Solon what made him dare to be so 
obstinate. Old age, said Solon. 

The lecture was on the whole acceptable, and 
a credit to our culture and civilization. — The 
reporter goes on to state that there will be no 
lecture next week, on account of the expected 
combat between the bear and the barbarian. 
Betting (sponsio) two to one {duo ad unum) on 
the bear. 

After all, the most encouraging things 



I find in the treatise, " De Senectute," are the 
stories of men who have found new occupations 
when ,£rrowin,£^ old, or kept up their common 
pursuits in the extreme period of life. Cato 
learned Greek when he was old, and speaks of 
wishing to learn the fiddle, or some such 



168 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

instrument, (fidihus,) after the example of 
Socrates. Solon learned something new, every 
day, in his old age, as he gloried to proclaim. 
Cyrus pointed out with pride and pleasure the 
trees he had planted with his own hand. [I 
rememher a pillar on the Duke of Northumber- 
land's estate at Alnwick, with an inscription in 
similar words, if not the same. That, like other 
country pleasures, never wears out. None is 
too rich, none too poor, none too young, none 
too old to enjoy it.] There is a New England 
story I have heard more to the point, however^ 
than any of Cicero's. A young farmer was 
urged to set out some apple-trees. — No, said he, 
they are too long growing, and I don't want to 
plant for other people. The young farmer's 
father was spoken to about it; but he, with bet- 
ter reason, alleged that apple-trees were slow 
and life was fleeting. At last someone men- 
tioned it to the old grandfather of the young 
farmer. He had nothing else to do, — so he 
stuck in some trees. He lived long enough 
to drink barrels of cider made from the apples 
that grew on those trees. 

As for myself, after visiting a friend lately, — 
[Do remember all the time that this is the Pro- 
fessor's paper,] — I satisfied myself that I had 
better concede the fact that — my contempo- 
raries are not so young as they have been, — and 
that, — awkward as it is, — science and history 
agree in telling me that I can claim the im- 
munities and must own the humiliatiorjs of the 
early stage of senilty. Ah! but we have oH goi»e 
down the hill together. The dandies of my 
time have split their waistbands and takeo to 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 169 

high-low shoes. The beauties of my recollec- 
tions — where are they? They have run the 
gantlet of the years as well as I. First the 
years pelted them with red roses till their 
cheeks were all on fire. By and by they began 
throwing white roses, and that morning flush 
passed away. At last one of the years threw a 
snow-ball, and after that no year let the poor 
girls pass without throwing snow-balls. And 
then came rougher missiles, — ice and stones; 
and from time to time an arrow whistled, and 
down went one of the poor girls. So there 
are but few left; and we don't call those few 
girls, but 

Ah, me! here am I groaning just as the old 
Greek sighed At at ! and the old Roman Eheu I 
I have no doubt we should die of shame and 
grief at the indignities offered us by age, if it 
were not that we see so many others as badly or 
worse off than ourselves. We always compare 
ourselves with our contemporaries. 

[I was interrupted in my reading just here. 
Before I began at the next breakfast, I read 
them these verses; — I hope you will like them,- 
and get a useful lesson from them.] 

THE LAST BLOSSOM. 

Thong-h young- no more, we still would dreans'. 

Of beauty's dear deluding wiles; 
The leagues of life to graybeards seem 

Shorter than boyhood's lingering miles. 

Wlio knows a woman's wild caprice? 

It played with Goethe's silvered hair, 
And many a Holy Father's *' niece " 

Has softly smoothed the papal chair. 



170 THE AUTOCKAT OF THE 

When sixty bids us sigh in vain 
To melt the heart of sweet sixteen, 

We think upon those ladies twain 

Who loved so well the tough old Dean. 

We see the Patriarch's wintry face, 
The maid of Egypt's dusky glow, 

And dream that Youth and Age embrace. 
As April violets fill with snow. 

Tranced in her Lord's 01ymx)ian smile 
His lotus-loving Memphian lies, — 

The musky daughter of the Nile 

With plaited hair and almond eyes. 

Might we but share one wild caress 
Ere life's autumnal blossoms fall, 

And Earth's brown, clinging lips impress 
The long cold kiss that waits us all! 

My bosom heaves, remeiubering yet 
The morning of that blissful day 

When Eose, the flower of spring, I met> 
And gave my raptured soul away. 

Flung from her eyes of purest blue, 
A lasso, with its leaping chain 

Light as a loop of larkspurs, flew 
O'er sense and spirit, heart and brain. 

Thou com'st to cheer my waning age, 
Sweet vision, w^aited for so long! 

Dove that wouldst seek the poet's cage 
Lured by the magic breath of song! 

She blushes! Ah, reluctant maid. 

Love's drapeau rouge the truth has told! 

O'er girlhood's yielding barricade 

Floats the great Leveler's crimson fold? 

Come to my arms! — love heeds not j^earsj 
No frost the bud of passion knows, — ■ 

Ha! what is this my frenzy hears? 
A voice behind me uttered, — Kose! 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 171 

Sweet was her smile, — but not for me: 
Alas, when woman looks too kind, 

Just turn your foolish head and see, — 
Some yotith is walking close behind! 

As to giving up because the almanac or the 
Family-Bible says that it is about time to do it, 
I have no intention of doing any such thing. 
I grant you that I burn less carbon than some 
years ago. I see people of my standing really 
good for nothing, decrepit, effete la tevre 
inferieure dejd pendante with what little life 
they have left mainly concentrated in their epi- 
gastrium. But as the disease of old age is 
epidemic, endemic, and sporadic, and every- 
body that lives long enough is sure to catch it, 
I am going to say, for the encouragement of 
such as need it, how I treat the malady in my 
own case. 

First. As I feel, that, when I have anything 
to do, there is less time for it than when I was 
younger, I find that I give my attention more 
thoroughly, and use my time more economically 
than ever before; so that I can learn anything 
twice as easily as in my earlier days. I am 
not, therefore, afraid to attack a new study. I 
took up a difficult language a very few years 
ago with good success, and think of mathe- 
matics and metaphysics by and by. 

Secondly. I have opened my eyes to a good 
many neglected privileges and pleasures with- 
in my reach, and requiring only a little courage 
to enjoy them. You may well suppose it 
pleased me to find that old Cato was thinking of 
learning to play the fiddle, when I had deliber- 
ately taken it up in my old age, and satisfied 



172 TllK AVTOiUAT OF THE 

myself that I could get much comfort, if not 
much music, out of it. 

Thirdly. I have found that some of those 
active exercises, which are commonly thought 
to belong to young folks only, may be enjoyed 
at a much later period. 

A young friend has lately written an admir- 
able article in one of the journals, entitled, 
" Saints and their Bodies." Approving of his 
general doctrines, and grateful for his records 
of personal experience, I cannot refuse to add 
my own experimental confirmation of his eulogy 
of one particular form of active exercise and 
amusement, namely, boating. For the past nine 
years, I have rowed about, during a good part 
of the summer, on fresh or salt water. My 
present fleet on the river Charles consists of 
three row-boats. 1. A small flat-bottomed skiff 
of the shape of a flat-iron, kept mainly to lend 
to boys. 2. A fancy " dory " for two pairs of 
sculls, in which I sometimes go out with my 
young folks. 3. My own particular water- 
sulky, a " skeleton " or " shell " race-boat, 
twenty-two feet long, with huge outriggers, 
which boat I pull with ten-foot sculls, — alone, 
of course, as it holds but one, and tips him out, 
if he doesn't mind what he is about. In this I 
glide around the Back Bay, down the stream, 
up the Charles to Cambridge and Watertown, 
up the Mystic, round the wharves, in the wake 
of steamboats, which have a swell after them 
delio:htful to rock upon; I linercr under the 
bridges, — those " caterpillar brid,^ep," as my 
brother Professor so happily called them; rub 
against the black sides of old wood-schooners; 



breakfast: table. 173 

cool down under the overhanging stern of some 
tall Jndia-man; stretch across to the Navy-Yai*d, 
where the sentinel warns me oh: from the OhiOf 
— just as if I should hurt her by lying in her 
shadow; then strike out into the harbor, where 
the water gets clear and the air smells of the 
ocean, — till all at once I remember, that, if a 
west wind blows up of a sudden, I shall drift 
along past the islands, out of sight of the dear 
old State-house, — plate, tumbler, knife and fork 
all waiting at home, but no chair drawn up at 
the table, — all the dear people waiting, wait- 
ing, waiting, while the boat is sliding, sliding, 
sliding into the great desert, where there is no 
tree and no fountain. As I don't ^vant my 
wreck to be washed up on one of the beaches 
in company with devils'-aproiis, bladder-weeds, 
dead horse-shoes, and bleached crab-shells, I 
turn about and flap my long, narrow^ wings for 
home. When the tide is running out swiftly, 
I have a splendid fight to get through the 
bridges, but always make it a rule to beat, — 
though I have been jammed up into pretty 
tight places at times, and was caught once be- 
tween a vessel swinging round and the pier, 
until our bones (the boat's that is) cracked as 
if we had been in the jaws of Behemoth. Then 
back to my moorings at the foot of the Com- 
mon, off with the rowing dress, dash under the 
green translucent wave, return to the garb of 
civilization, walk through my garden, take a 
look at my elms on the Common, and, reach- 
ing my habitat, in consideration of my ad- 
vanced period of life, indulge in the Elysian 
abandonment of a huo^e recumbent chair. 



174 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

When I have established a pair of well-pro- 
neunced feathering-calluses on my thumbs, 
when I am in training so that I can do my fif- 
teen miles at a stretch without coming to grief 
in any way, when I can perform my mile in 
eight minutes or a little less, then I feel as if I 
had old Time's head in chancery, and could 
give it to him at my leisure. 

I do not deny the attraction of walking. I 
have bored this ancient city through and 
through in my daily travels, until I know it as 
an old inhabitant of Cheshire knows his cheese. 
Why, it was I who, in the course of these ram- 
bles, discovered that remarkable avenue called 
Myrtle Street, stretching in one long line from 
east of the Eeservoir to a precipitous and 
rudely paved cliff which looks down on the 
grim abode of Science, and beyond it to the far 
hills; a promenade so delicious in its repose, so 
cheerfully varied with glimpses down the north- 
ern slope into busy Cambridge Street, with its 
iron river of the horse-railroad, and wheeled 
barges gliding backward and forward over it, — 
so delightfully closing at its western extremity 
in sunny courts and passages where I know 
peace, and beauty, and virtue, and serene old 
age must be perpetual tenants, — so alluring to 
all who desire to take their daily stroll, in the 
words of Dr. Watts, — 

" Alike unknowing- and unknown," — 

that nothing but a sense of dijty v/ould have 
prompted me to reveal the secret of its exist- 
ence. I concede, therefore, that walking is an 



BREAKFAST TAULE. 11 5 

immeasurably fine invention, of which old age 
ought constantly to avail itself. 

Saddle-leather is in some respects even prefer- 
able to sole-leather. The principal objection to 
it is of a financial character. But you may be 
sure that Bacon and Sydenham did not recom- 
mend it for nothing. One's hepar, or, in vulgar 
language, liver, — a ponderous organ, weighing: 
some three or four pounds, — goes up and 
down like the dasher of a churn in the 
midst of the other vital arrangements, at every 
step of a trotting horse. The brains also are 
shaken up like coppers in a money-box. Riding 
is good, for those that are born with a silver- 
mouthed bridle in their hand, and can ride ar 
much and as often as they like, without think- 
ing all the time they hear that steady grinding 
sound as the horse's jaws triturate with calm 
lateral movement the bank-bills and promises 
to pay upon which it is notorious that the 
profligate animal in question feeds day and 
night. 

Instead, however, of considering these kinds 
of exercise in this empirical way, I will devote 
a brief space to an examination of them in a 
more scientific form. 

The pleasure of exercise is due first to a 
purely physical impression, and secondly to a 
sense of power in action. The first source of 
pleasure varies of course with our condition and 
the state of the surrounding circumstances; 
the second with the amount and kind of power, 
nnd the extent and kind of action. In all 
fv/rms of active exercise there are three powers 
simultaneously in action, — the will, the mus- 



176 THE AUTOCRAT OF T1\K 

cles, and the intellect. Each of these predomi- 
nates in different kinds of exercise. In walk- 
ing, the will and muscles are so accustomed to 
work together and perform their task with so 
little expenditure of force, that the intellect is 
left comparatively free. The mental pleasure 
in walking, as such, is in the sense of power 
over all our moving machinery. But in riding 
I have the additional pleasure of governing an- 
other will, and my muscles extend to the tips of 
the animal's ears and to his four hoofs, instead 
of stopping at my hands and feet. Now in this 
extension of my volition and my physical frame 
into another animal, my tyrannical instincts 
and my desire for heroic strength are at once 
gratified. When the horse ceases to have a 
will of his own and his muscles require no 
special attention on your part, then you may 
live on horseback as Wesley did, and write ser- 
mons or take naps, as you like. But you will 
observe, that, in riding on horseback, you 
always have a feeling, that, after all, it is not 
you that do the work, but the animal, and this 
prevents the satisfaction from being complete. 
Xow let us look at the conditions of rowing. 
I won't suppose you to be disgracing yourself 
in one of those miserable tubs, tugging in which 
is to rowing the true boat what riding a cow is 
to be striding an Arab. You know the Esqui- 
maux Myah, (if that is the name of it,) don't 
you? Look at that model of one over my door. 
Sharp, rather? — On the contrary, it is a lubber 
to the one you and I must have; a Dutch fish- 
wife to Psyche, contrasted with what I will tell 
you about. Our boat, then, is something of 



BRJiAKFAST TABLE. 



the shape of a pickerel, as you look down upon 
its back, he lying in the sunshine just where 
the sharp edge of the water cuts in among the 
lily-pads. It is a kind of a giant pod, as one 
may say, — tight everywhere, except in a little 
place in the middle where you sit. Its length 
is from seven to ten yards, and as it is only 
from sixteen to thirty inches wide in its widest 
part, you understand why you want those 
" outriggers," or projecting iron frames with 
the rowlocks in which the oars play. My row- 
locks are five feet apart; double or more than 
double the greatest width of the boat. 

Here you are, then, afloat with a body a rod 
and a half long, with arms, or wings, as you may 
choose to call them, stretching more than 
twenty feet from tip to tip; every volition of 
yours extending as perfectly into them as if your 
spinal cord ran down the center strip of your 
boat, and the nerves of your arms tingled as 
far as the broad blades of your oars, — oars of 
spruce, balanced, leathered, and ringed under 
your own special direction. This, in- sober 
earnest, is the nearest approach to flying that 
man has ever made or perhaps ever will make. 
As the hawk sails without flapping his pinions^ 
so you drift with the tide when you will, in the 
most luxurious form of locomotion indulged 
to an embodied spirit. But if your blood wants 
rousing, turn round that stake in the river, 
which you see a mile from here; and when you 
come in in sixteen minutes, (if you do, for we 
are old boys, and not champion scullers, you 
remember,) then say if you begin to feel a 
little warmed up or not! You can row easily 



1V8 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

and gently all day, and you can row yourself 
blind and black in the face in ten minutes, just 
as you like. It has been long agreed that there 
is no way in which a man can accomplish so 
much labor with his muscles as in rowing. It 
is in the boat, then, that man finds the largest 
extension of his volitional and muscular ex- 
istence; and yet he may tax both of thefti so 
slightly, in that most delicious of exercises,, 
that he shall mentally write his sermon, or his- 
poem, or recall the remarks he has made in 
company and put them in form for the public, 
as well as in Ms easy-chair. 

I dare not publicly name the rare joys, the 
infinite delights, that intoxicate me on some 
sweet June morning, when the river and bay 
are smooth as a sheet of beryl-green silk, and 
I run along ripping it up with my knife-edged 
shell of a boat, the rent closing after me like 
those wounds of angels which Milton tells of, 
but the seam still shining for many a long 
rood behind me. To lie still over the Flats, 
where the waters are shallow, and see the crabs 
crawling and the sculpins gliding busily and 
silently beneath the boat — to rustle in through 
the long harsh grass that leads up some tran- 
quil creek, — to take shelter from the sunbeams 
under one of the thousand-footed bridges, and 
look down its interminable colonnades, crusted 
with green and oozy growths, studded with mi- 
nute barnacles, and belted with rings of dark 
muscles, while overhead streams and tliunders 
that other river whose every vrave is a human 
soul flowing to eternity as the river below flows 
to the ocean, — lying there moored unseen, in 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 179 

loneliness so profound that the columns of 
Tadnior in the Desert could not seem more re- 
mote from life, — the cool breeze on one's fore- 
head, the stream whispering against the half- 
sunken pillars, — why should I tell of these 
things, that I should live to see my beloved 
haunts invaded and the waves blackened v.ith 
boats as with a swarm of water-beetles? What 
a city of idiots we must be not to have covered 
the glorious bay with gondolas and wherries, 
as we have just learned to cover the ice in win- 
ter with skaters! 

I am satisfied that such a set of black-coated, 
stiff -jointed, soft-muscled, paste-complexioned 
youth as we can boast in our Atlantic cities 
never before sprang from loins of Anglo-Saxon 
lineage. Of the females that are the mates of 
these males I do not here speak. I preached my 
sermon from the lay-pulpit on this matter a 
good while ago. Of course, if you heard it, 
you know my belief is that the total climatic 
influences here are getting up a number of new 
patterns of humanity, some of which are not 
an improvement on the old model. Clipper- 
built, sharp in the bows, long in the spars, slen- 
der to look at, and fast to go, the ship, which is 
the great organ of our national life of relation,, 
is but a reproduction of the typical form which 
the elements impress upon its builder. All this 
we cannot help; but we can make the best of 
these influences, such as they are. We have a 
few good boatmen, — no good horsemen that I 
hear of, — nothing remarkable, I believe, in 
cricketing, — and as for any great athletic feat 
performed by a gentleman in these latitudes. 



180 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

society would drop a man who should run round 
the Common in five minutes. Some of our 
amateur fencers, single-stick players, and box- 
ers, we have no reason to be ashamed of. Box- 
ing is rough play, but not too rough for a hearty 
young fellow. Anything is better than this 
white-blooded degeneration to which we all 
tend. 

I dropped into a gentlemen's sparring exhibi- 
tion only last evening. It did my heart good 
to see that there were a few young and 
youngish youths left who could take care of 
their own heads in case of emergency. It is 
a fine sight, that of a gentleman resolving him- 
self into the primitive constituents of his hu- 
manity. Here is a delicate young man now, 
with an intellectual countenance, a slight figure, 
a sub-pallid complexion, a most unassuming 
deportment, a mild adolescent in fact, that any 
Hiram or Jonathan from between the plow- 
t^ls would of course expect to handle with per- 
fect ease. Oh, he is taking off his gold-bowed 
spectacles! Ah, he is divesting himself of his 
cravat! Why, he is stripping off his coat! 
Well, here he is, sure enough, in a tight silk 
shirt, and with two things that look like batter 
puddings in the place of his fists. Now see 
that other fellow with another pair of batter 
puddings, — the big one with the broad shoul- 
ders; he will certainly knock the little man's 
head off, if he strikes him. Feinting, dodging, 
stopping, hitting, countering, — little man's 
head not off yet. You might as well try to 
jump upon your own shadow as to hit the lit- 
tle man's intellectual features. He needn't 



BKEAKFAST TABLE. 181 

have taken off the gold-bowed spectacles at all. 
Quick, cautious, shifty, nimble, cool, he catches 
all the fierce lunges or gets out of their reach, 
till his turn comes, and then, whack goes one 
of the batter puddings against the big one's ribs,, 
and bang goes the other into the big one's face, 
and, staggering, shuffling, slipping, tripping, 
collapsing, sprawling, down goes the big one in 
a miscellaneous bundle. — If my young friend, 
whose excellent article I have referred to, 
could only introduce the manly art of self 
defense among the clergy, I am satisfied that 
we should have better sermons and an infi- 
nitely less quarrelsome church-militant. A 
bout with the gloves would let off the ill- 
nature, and cure the indigestion, which, united,, 
have embroiled their subject in a bitter con- 
troversy. We should then often hear that a 
point of difference between an infallible and a 
heretic, instead of being vehemently discussed 
in a series of newspaper articles, had been 
settled by a friendly contest in several rounds, 
at the close of which the parties shook hands 
and appeared cordially reconciled. 

But boxing you and I are too old for, I am 
afraid. I was for a moment tempted, by the 
contagion of muscular electricity last evening, 
to try the gloves with the Benicia Boy, who 
looked in as a friend to the noble art; but re- 
membering that he had twice my weight and 
half my age, besides the advantage of his train- 
ing, I sat still and said nothing. 

There is one other delicate point I wish to 
speak of with reference to old age. I refer to 
the use of dioptric media which correct the 



182 THE AUTOCKAT OF THE 

-diminished refracting power of the hnmors of 
the eye, — in other words, spectacles. I don't 
use them. All I ask is a large, fair type, a 
strong daylight or gas-light, and one yard of 
focal distance, and my eyes are as good as ever. 
But if your eyes fail, I can tell you something 
encouraging. There is now living in New 
York State an old gentleman who, perceiv- 
ing his sight to fail, immediately took to 
exercising it on the finest print, and in this 
way fairly bullied Nature out of her foolish 
habit of taking liberties at five-and-forty, or 
thereabout. And now this old gentleman per- 
forms the most extraordinary feats with his pen, 
showing that his e3^es must be a pair of micro- 
scopes. I should be afraid to say to you how 
much he writes in the compass of a half-dime, 
— whether the Psalms or the Gospels, or the 
Psalms &.nd the Gospels, I won't be positive. 

But now let me tell you this. If the time 
-comes when you must lay down the fiddle and 
the bow, because your fingers are too stiff, and 
drop the ten-foot sculls, because your arms are 
too weak, and after dallying a while with eye- 
glasses, come at last to the undisguised reality 
of spectacles, — if the time comes when that fire 
of life we spoke of has burned so low tha j where 
its flames reverberated there is only the somber 
stain of regret, and where its coals glowed, only 
the white ashes that cover the embers of 
memory, — don't let your heart grow cold, and 
jow may carry cheerfulness and love with you 
into the teens of your second centur}^, if you can 
last so long. As our friend, the Poet, once said, 



BREAKFAST TATILE. 183 

in some of those old-fashioned heroics of his 
which he keeps for his private reading, — 

Call him not old, whose visionary brain 

Holds o'er the past its undivided reign. 

For him in vain the envious seasons roll 

Who bears eternal summer in his soul. 

If yet the minstrel's song, the poet's lay. 

Spring with her birds, or children with their play. 

Or maiden's smile, or heavenly dream of art 

Stir the few life-drops creeping round his heart, — 

Turn to the record where his years are told, — 

Count his gray hairs, — they cannot make him old! 

End of the Professor's paper. 

[The above essay was not read at one time, 
hut in several installments, and accompanied by 
various comments from different persons at the 
table. The company were in the main atten- 
tive, with the exception of a little somnolence 
on the part of the old gentleman opposite at 
times, and a few sly, malicious questions about 
the " old boys " on the part of that forward 
young fellow who has figured occasionally, not 
always to his advantage, in these reports. 

On Sunday mornings, in obedience to a feel- 
ing I am not ashamed of, I have always tried 
to give a more appropriate character to our con- 
versation. I have never read them my sermon 
yet, and I don't know that I shall, as some of 
them might take my convictions as a personal 
indignity to themselves. But having read 
our company so much of the Professor's talk 
about age and other subjects connected with 
physical life, I took the next Sunday morning 
to repeat to them the following poem of his, 



184 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

vhich I have had hy me some time. He calls 
it — I suppose, for his professional friends — The 
Anatomist's Hymn; but I shall name it — ] 

THE LIVING TEMPLE. 

Not in the world of light alone, 

Where God has built his blazing throne. 

Nor yet alone in earth below, 

With belted seas that come and go, 

And endless isles of sunlit green. 

Is all thy Maker's glory seen: 

Look in upon thy wondrous frame,— 

Eternal wisdom still the same! 

The smooth, soft air with pulse-like waves 
Plows murmuring through its hidden caves,^ 
Whose streams of brightening purple rush. 
Fired with a new and livelier blush, 
While all their burden of decay 
The ebbing current steals away, 
And red with Nature's flame they start 
From the warm fountains of the heart. 

No rest that throbbing slave may ask. 
Forever quivering o'er his task. 
While far and wide a crimson jet 
Leaps forth to fill the woven net 
Which in unnumbered crossing tides 
The flood of burning life divides. 
Then kindling each decaying part: 
Creeps back to find the throbbing heart. 

But warned with that unchanging flame 
Behold the outward moving frame. 
Its living marbles jointed strong 
With glistening band and silvery thong,- 
And linked to reason's guiding reins 
By myriad rings in trembling chains, 
Each graven with the threaded zone 
Which claims it as the master's own. 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 18^ 

See how yon beam of seeming" white 
Is braided out of seven-hued light, 
Yet in those lucid globes no ray 
By any chance shall break astray. 
Hark how the rolling surge of sound, 
Arches and spirals circling round, 
Wakes the hushed spirit through thine ear 
With music it is heaven to hear. 

Then mark the cloven sphere that holds 
All thought in its mysterious folds, 
That feels sensation's faintest thrill. 
And flashes forth the sovereign will; 
Think on the stormy world that dwells 
Locked in its dim and clustering cells! 
The lightning gleams of power it sheds 
Along its hollow glassy threads! 

O Father! grant thy love divine 
To make these mystic temples thine! 
When wasting age and wearying strife, 
Have sapped the leading walls of life, 
When darkness gathers over all. 
And the last tottering pillars fall, 
Take the poor dust thy mercy warms 
And mold it into heavenly forms! 



VIII. 



[Spring has come. You will lind some 
verses to that effect at the end of these notes. 
If you are an impatient reader, skip to them at 
once. In reading aloud, omit, if you please, 
the sixth and seventh verses. These are paren- 
thetical and digressive, and, unless your audi- 
ence is of superior intelligence, will confuse 
them. Many people can ride on horseback who 
find it hard to get on and to get off without 
assistance. One has to dismount from ar^^ 



186 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

idea, and get into the saddle again, at every 
parenthesis.] 

The old gentleman who sits opposite,. 

finding that spring had fairly come, mounted 
a white hat one day, and walked into the street. 
It seems to have been a premature or other- 
wise exceptionable exhibition, not unlike that 
commemorated by the late Mr. Bajdey. When 
the old gentleman came home, he looked very- 
red in the face, and complained that he had 
been " made sport of." By sympathizing ques- 
tions, I learned from him that a boy had called 
him " old daddy," and asked him when he had 
his hat whitewashed. 

This incident led me to make some observa- 
tions at table the next morning, which I here 
repeat for the benefit of the readers of this 
record. 

The hat is the vulnerable point of the 

artificial integument. I learned this in early 
boyhood. I was once equipped in a hat of Leg- 
horn straw, having a brim of much wider di- 
mensions than were usual at that time, and sent 
to school in that portion of my native town 
which lies nearest to this metropolis. On my 
way I was met by a " Port-chuck," as we used 
to call the young gentlemen of that locality, 
and the following dialogue ensued. 

The Port-clmck. Hullo, You-sir, did you 
know there was gon-to be a race to-morrah? 

Myself. No. Who's gon-to run, Vwher's't 
gon-to be?" 

The Port-chuck,. Squire Mico and Doctor 
Williams, round the brim o' your hat. 

These tv/o much-respected gentlemen being 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 18V 

the oldest inhabitants at that time, and the 
alleo-ed race-course being out of the question, 
the Port-chuck also winking and thrusting his 
tongue into his cheek, I perceived that I had 
been trifled with, and the effect has been to 
make me sensitive and observant respecting this 
article of dress ever since. Here is an axiom 
or two relating to it. 

A hat whicli has been popped, or exploded 
by being sat down upon, is never itself again 
afterward. 

It is a favorite illusion of sanguine natures to 
believe the contrary. 

Shabby gentility has nothing so characteristic 
as its hat. There is always an unnatural calm- 
ness about its nap, and an unwholesome gloss, 
suggestive of a wet brush. 

The last effort of decayed fortune is ex- 
pended in smoothing its dilapidated castor. 
The hat is the ultimum moriens of '^ respecta- 
bility." 

The old gentleman took all these re- 
marks and maxims very pleasantly, saying, how- 
ever, that he had forgotten most of his French, 
except the word for potatoes, — pummies de tare. 
— Ultimum moriens, I told him, is old Italian, 
and signifies last thing to die. With this expla- 
nation he was well contented, and looked quite 
calm, when I saw him afterward in the entry 
with a black hat on his head and the white one 
in his hand. 

T think m^yself fortunate in having the 

Poet and the Professor for my intimates. "We 
are so much together, that we no doubt think 



188 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

and talk a good deal alike; yet our points of 
view are in many respects individual and 
peculiar. You know me well enough by this 
time. I have not talked with you so long for 
nothing, and therefore I don't think it neces- 
sary to draw my own portrait. But let me say 
a word or two about my friends. 

The Professor considers himself, and I con- 
sider him, a very useful and worthy kind of 
drudge. I think he has a pride in his small 
technicalities. I know that he has a great idea 
of fidelity, and though I suspect he laughs a 
little inwardly at times at the grand airs " Sci- 
ence " puts on, as she stands marking time, but 
not getting on, while the trumpets are blowing 
and the big drums beating, — yet I am sure he 
has a liking for his specialty, and a respect for 
its cultivators. 

But I'll tell you what the Professor said to 
the Poet the other day. — My boy, said he, I can 
work a great deal cheaper than you, because I 
keep all my goods in the lower story. You 
have to hoist yours into the upper chambers 
of the brain, and let them down again to your 
customers. I take mine in at the level of the 
ground, and send them off from my doorstep 
almost without lifting. I tell you, the higher 
a man has to carry the raw material of thought 
before he works it up, the more it costs him iijL 
blood, nerve, and muscle. Coleridge knew all 
this very well when he advised every literar^ 
man to have a profession. 

Sometimes I like to talk witli ore of 

them, and sometimes with the other. After a 
while I get tired of both. When a fit of intel- 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 189 

lectual disgust comes over me, I will tell you 
what 1 have found admirable as a diversion, in 
addition to boating and other amusements 
which I have spoken of, — that is, working at 
my carpenter's-bench. Some mechanical em- 
ployment is the greatest possible relief, after 
the purely intellectual faculties begin to tire. 
When I was quarantined once at Marseilles, I 
got to work immediately at carving a wooden 
wonder of loose rings on a stick, and got so 
interested in it, that, when we were set loose, 
I " regained my freedom with a sigh," because 
my toy w^as unfinished. 

There are long seasons when I talk only with 
the Professor, and others when I give myself 
wholly up to the Poet. Now that my winter's 
work is over, and spring is with us, I feel natu- 
rally drawn to the Poet's company. I don't 
know anybody more alive to life than he is. 
The passion of poetry seizes on him every 
spring, he says, — yet oftentimes he complains, 
that, when he feels most, he can sing least. 

Then a fit of despondency comes over him. — 
I feel ashamed, sometimes,— -said he, the other 
day, — to think how far my worst songs fall 
below my best. It sometimes seems to me, 
as I know it does to others who have told me 
so, that they ought to be all best, — if not in 
actual execution, at least in plan and motive. 
I am grateful — he continued — for all such criti- 
cisms. A man is always pleased to have his 
most serious efforts praised, and the highest 
aspect of his nature get the most sunshine. 

Yet I am sure, that, in the nature of things, 
many minds must change their key now and 



190 THE AUTOCKAT OF THE 

then, on penalty of getting out of tune or los- 
ing their voices. You know, I suppose, — he 
said, — what is meant by complementary colors? 
You know the eliect, too, that the prolonged 
impression of any one color has on the retina. 
If you close your eyes after looking steadiiy at 
a red object, you see a green image. 

It is so with many minds, — I will not say 
with all. After looking at one aspect of ex^ 
ternal nature, or of any form of beauty or truth, 
when they turn away, the complementary aspect 
©f the same object stamps itself irresistibly and 
automatically upon the mind. Shall they give 
expression to this secondary mental state, or 
not? 

When I contemplate — said my friend, the 
Poet — the infinite largeness of comprehension 
belonging to the Central Intelligence, how re- 
mote the creative conception is from all 
scholastic and ethical formulae, I am led to 
think that a healthy mind ought to change its 
mood from time to tinie, and come down from 
its noblest condition, — never, of course, to de- 
grade itself by dwelling upon what is itself de- 
basing, but to let its lower faculties have a 
chance to air and exercise themselves. After 
the first and second floor have been out in the 
bright street dressed in all their splendors, shall 
not our humble friends in the basement have 
their holiday, and the cotton velvet and the 
thin-sldnned jewelry — simple adornments, but 
befitting the station of those who vrear tlicni — 
show themselves to the crowd, who think them 
beautiful, as they ought to, though the people 
np-stairs know that they are cheap and perish- 
able? 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 191 

1 don't know that I may nc>t bring the 

Poet here, some day or other, and let him speak 
for himself. Still I think I can tell yen vrhat 
he says quite as well as he could do it. — Oh. — 
he said to me, one day, — I am but a hand-organ 
man, — say rather, a hand-organ. Life turns the 
winch, and fancy or accident pulls out the stops. 
I come under your windows, some fine spring; 
morning, and play you one of my adagio move- 
ments, and some of you say, — This is good, — 
play us so always. But, dear friends, if I did 
not change the stop sometimes, the machine 
would wear out in one part and rust in another. 
How easily this or that tune flows! — you say, — 
there must be no end of just such melodies in 
him. — I will open the poor machine for you one 
moment, and- you shall look. — Ah! Every note 
marks where a spur of steel has been driven in. 
It is easy to grind out the song, but to plant 
these bristling points which make it was the 
painful task of time. 

I don't like to say it, — he continued, — but 
poets commonly have no larger stock of tunes 
than hand-organs; and when you hear them 
piping up under your window, you know pretty 
well what to expect. The more stops, the bet- 
ter. Do let them all be pulled out in their 
turn! 

So spoke my friend, the Poet, and read me 
one of his stateliest songs, and after it a gay 
cJianson, and then a string of epigrams. All 
true, — he said, — all flowers of his soul; only 
one with the corolla spread, and another vrith 
its flisk half opened, and tlie third with the 
heart-leaves covered up and only a p etal or two 



192 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

showing its tip through the calyx. The 
water Hly is the type of the poet's soul, — he 
told me. 

What do you think, Sir, — said the divin- 
ity-student, — opens the souls of the poets most 
fully? 

Why, there must be the internal force and 
the external stimulus, ^'either is enough by 
itself. A rose will not flower in the dark, and a 
fern will not flower anywhere. 

What do I think is the true sunshine that 
opens the poet's corolla? — I don't like to say. 
They spoil a good many, I am afraid; or at 
least they shine on a good many that never 
come to anything. 

Who are tliey^ — said the schoolmistress. 

Women. Their love first inspires the poet, 
and their praise is his best reward. 

The schoolmistress reddened a little, but 
looked pleased. — Did I really think so? — I do 
think so; I never feel safe until I have pleased 
them; I don't think they are the first to see one's 
defects, but they are the first to catch the color 
and fragrance of a true poem. Fit the same in- 
tellect to a man and it is a bow-string, — to a 
woman and it is a harp-string. She is vibratile 
and resonant all over, so she stirs with slighter 
musical tremblings of the air about her. — Ah, 
me! — said my friend, the Poet, to me, the other 
day, — what color would it not have given to my 
thoughts, and what thrice-washed whiteness to 
my words, had I been fed on women's praises! 
I should have grown like Marvell's fawn, — 

"Lilies without; roses within! '* 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 19$ 

But tlieiij — he added, — we all think, if so and 
so, we should have been this or that, as you 
were saying, the other day, in those rhymes of 
yours. 

1 don't think there are many poets in the 

sense of creators; but of those sensitive natures 
w^hich reflect themselves naturally in soft and 
melodious words, pleading for sympathy with 
their joys and sorrows, every literature is fulL 
Nature carves with her own hands the brain 
which holds the creative imagination, but she 
casts the over-sensitive creatures in scores from 
the same mold. 

There are two kinds of poets, just as there 
are two kinds of blondes. [Movement of curi- 
osity among our ladies at table. — Please to tell 
us about those blondes, said the schoolmistress.] 
Why, there are blondes who are such simply by 
deficiency of coloring matter, — negative or 
washed blondes, arrested by Nature on the way 
to become albinesses. There are others that are 
shot through with golden light, with tawny or 
fulvous tinges in various degree, — positive or 
stained blondes, dipped in yellow sunbeams, and 
as unlike in their m.ode of being to the others 
as an orange is unlike a snowball. The albino- 
style carries with it a wide pupil and a sensitive 
retina. The other, or the leonine blonde, has 
an opaline fire in her clear eye, which the bru- 
nette can hardly match with her quick, glitter- 
ing glances. 

Just so we have the great sun-kindled, con- 
structive imaginations, and a far more numer- 
ous class of poets who have a certain kind of 
moonlight genius given them to compensate for 



194 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

their imperfection of nature. Their want of 
mental coloring-matter makes them sensitive to 
those impressions which stronger minds neglect 
or never feel at all. Many of them die young, 
and all of them are tinged with melancholy. 
There is no more beautiful illustration of the 
principle of compensation which marks the Di- 
vine benevolence than the fact that some of the 
holiest lives and some of the sweetest songs are 
the growth of the infirmity which unfits its sub- 
ject for the rougher duties of life. When one 
reads the life of Cowper, or of Keats, or of Lu- 
cretia and Margaret Davidson, — of so many 
gentle, sweet natures, born to weakness, and 
mostly dying before their time, — one cannot 
help thinking that the human race dies out 
singing, like the swan in the old story. The 
French poet, Gilbert, who died at the Hotel 
Dieu, at the age of twenty-nine, — (killed by a 
key in his throat, which he had swallowed when 
delirious in consequence of a fall,) — this poor 
fellow was a very good example of the poet by 
excess of sensibility. I found, the other day, 
that some of my literary friends had never heard 
of him, though I suppose few educated French- 
men do not know the lines which he wrote, a 
week before his death, upon a mean bed in the 
great hospital of Paris. 

" An banquet de la vie, infortnne convive, 

J'apparus un jour, et je meurs; 
Je meurs, et sur ma tombe, ou lentement j'arrive, 

Nul ne viendra verser des pleurs." 

At life's gay banquet placed, a poor unhappy 
guest. 
One day I pass, then disappear; 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 195 

I die, and on the tomb where I at length shall 
rest, 
No friend shall come to shed a tear. 

You remember the same thing in other words 
somewhere in Kirke White's poems. It is the 
burden of the plaintive songs of all these sweet 
albino-poets. '^ I shall die and be forgotten, 
and the world will go on just as if I had never 
been; — and yet how I have loved! how I have 
longed! how I have aspired! " And so singing, 
their eyes grow brighter and brighter, and their 
features thinner and thinner, until at last the 
veil of flesh is threadbare, and, still singing, 
they drop it and pass onward. 

Our brains are seventy-year clocks. The 

Angel of Life winds them up once for all, then 
closes the case, and gives the key into the hand 
of the Angel of the Resurrection. 

Tic-tac! tic-tac! go the wheels of thought; 
our will cannot stop them; they cannot stop 
themselves; sleep cannot still them; madness 
only makes them go faster; death alone can 
break into the case, and, seizing the ever-swing- 
ing pendulum, which we call the heart, silence 
at last the clicking of the terrible escapement 
we have carried so long beneath our wrinkled 
foreheads. 

If we could only get at them, as we lie on our 
pillows and count the dead beats of thought 
after thought and image after image jarring 
through the overtired organ! Will nobody 
block those wheels, uncouple that pinion, cut 
the string that holds those weights, blow up the 
infernal machine with gunpowder? What a 



196 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

passion comes over us sometimes for silence and 
rest! — that this dreadful mechanism, unwind- 
ing the endless tapestry of time, embroidered 
with spectral figures of life and death, could 
have but one brief holiday! Who can wonder 
that men swing themselves off from beams in 
hempen lassos? — that they jump off from para- 
pets into the swift and gurgling waters beneath? 
— that they take counsel of the grim friend who 
has but to utter his one peremptory monosyl- 
lable and the restless machine is shivered as a 
vase that is dashed upon a marble floor? Under 
that building which we pass every day there are 
strong dungeons, where neither hook, nor bar, 
nor bed-cord, nor drinking-vessel from which a 
sharp fragment may be shattered, shall by any 
chance be seen. There is nothing for it, when 
the brain is on fire with the whirling of its 
wheels, but to spring against the stone wall and 
silence them with one crash. Ah, they remem- 
bered that, — the kind city fathers, — and the 
walls are nicely padded, so that one can take 
such exercise as he likes without damaging him- 
self on the very plain and serviceable uphol- 
stery. If anybody would only contrive some 
kind of a lever that one could thrust in among 
the works of this horrid automaton and check 
them, or alter their rate of going, what would 
the world give for the discovery? 

From half a dime to a dime, according 

to the style of the place and the quality of the 
liquor, — said the young fellow whom they call 
John, 

Yon speak trivially, but not unwisel}^, — I 
said. Unless the will maintain a certain con- 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 197 

trol over these movements, which it cannot 
stop, but can to some extent regulate, men are 
very apt to try to get at the machine by some 
indirect system of leverage or other. They clap 
on the brakes by means of opium; they change 
the maddening monotony of the rhythm by 
means of fermented liquors. It is because the 
brain is locked up and we cannot touch its 
movement directly, that we thrust these coarse 
tools in through any crevice by which they may 
reach the interior, and so alter its rate of going 
for a while, and at last spoil the machine. 

Men who exercise chiefly those faculties of 
the mind which work independently of the will, 
— poets and artists, for instance, who follow 
their imagination in their creative moments, in- 
stead of kcepJDg it in hand as your logicians 
and practical men do with their reasoning fac- 
ulty, — such men are too apt to call in the me- 
chanical appliances to help them govern their 
intellects. 

He means they get drunk, — said the 

young fciJow already alluded to by name. 

Do you think men of true genius are apt to 
indulge in the use of inebriating fluids? — said 
the divinity-student. 

If you think you are strong enough to bear 
what I am going to say, — I replied, — I will talk 
to you about this. But mind, now, these are 
the things that some foolish people call dan- 
gerous subjects, — as if these vices which bur- 
row into people's souls, as the Guinea-worm 
burrows into the naked feet of Vv'est-Indian 
slaves, would be more mischievous when seen 
than out of sight. Xovr the true way to deal 



198 THE AUTOCKAT OF THE 

with those obstinate animals^ which are a dozen 
feet long, some of them, and no bigger than a 
horse-hair, is to get a piece of silk around their 
heads, and pull them out very cautiously. If 
you only break them oft', they grow worse than, 
ever, and sometimes kill the person that has the 
misfortune of harboring one of them. Whencej 
it is plain that the first thing to do is to find] 
out where the head lies. 

Just so of all the vices, and particularly of 
this vice of intemperance. What is the head of 
it, and where does it lie ? For you may depend 
upon it, there is not one of these vices that has 
not a head of its own, — an intelligence, — a 
meaning, — a certain virtue, I was going to say, 
■ — but that might, perhaps, sound paradoxical. 
I have heard an immense number of moral phy- 
sicians lay down the treatment of moral Guinea- 
worms, and the vast majority of them would al- 
ways insist that the creature had no head at all, 
but was all body and tail. So I have found a 
very common result of their method to be that 
the string slipped, or that a piece only of the 
creature was broken off', and the vv^orm soon 
grew again, as bad as ever. The truth is, if the 
Devil could only appear in church by attorney, 
and make the best statement that the facts 
would bear him out in doing on behalf of his 
special virtues, (what we commonly call vices,) 
the influence of good teachers would be much 
greater than it is. For the arguments by which 
the Devil prevails are precisely the ones that 
the Devil-queller most rarely answers. The way 
to argue down a vice is not to tell lies about it, 
- — to say that it has no attractions, when every- 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 199 

body knows that it has, — but rather to let it 
make out its ease, just as it certainly will in the 
moment of temptation, and then meet it with 
the weapons furnished by the Divine armory. 
Ithuriel did not spit the toad on his spear, you 
remember, but touched him with it, and the 
blasted angel took the sad glories of his true 
shape. If he had shown fight then, the fair 
spirits would have known how to deal with 
him. 

That all spasmodic cerebral action is an evil 
is npt perfectly clear. Men get fairly intoxi- 
cated with music, with poetry, with religious ex- 
citement, — oftenest with love. Ninon de TEn- 
clos said she was so easily excited that her soup 
intoxicated her, and convalescents have been 
made tipsy by a beef-steak. 

There are forms and stages of alcoholic exal- 
tation, which, in themselves, and without re- 
gard to their consequences, might be considered 
as positive improvements of the persons 
affected. When the sluggish intellect is 
roused, the slow speech quickened, the cold 
nature warmed, the latent sympathy developed, 
the flagging spirit kindled, — before the trains 
of thought become confused, or the will per- 
verted, or the muscles relaxed, — just at the 
moment when the whole human zoophyte flow- 
ers out like a full-blown rose, and is ripe for 
the subscription-paper err the contribution-box, 
— it would be hard to say that a man was, at that 
very time, worse, or less to be loved, than when 
driving a hard bargain with all his meaner wits 
about him. The difficulty is. that the alcoholic 
virtues don't wash: but until the water takes 



200 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

their colors out, the tints are very much like 
those of the true celestial stuff. 

[Here I was interrupted by a question which 
I am very unwilling to report, but have conii- 
dence enough in those friends who examine 
these records to commit to their candor. 

A person at table asked me whether I " went 
in for rum as a steady drink"? — His manner 
made the question highly offensive, but I re- 
strained myself, and answered thus: — ] 

Rum I take to be the name which unwashed 
moralists apply alike to the product distilled 
from molasses and the noblest juices of the 
vineyard. Burgundy " in all its sunset glow " 
is rum. Champagne, '' the foaming wine of 
Eastern France," is rum. Hock, which our 
friend, the Poet, speaks of as 

•' The Rhine's breastmilk, g-ushing" cold and bright. 
Pale as the moon, and maddening as her light," 

is rum. Sir, I repudiate the loathsome vulgar- 
ism as an insult to the first miracle wrought by 
the Founder of our religion! I address myself 
to the company. — I believe in temperance, nay, 
almost in abstinence, as a rule for healthy peo- 
ple. I trust that I practice both. But let me 
tell you, there are companies of men of genius 
into which I sometimes go, where the atmos- 
phere of intellect and sentiment is so much 
more stimulating than alcohol, that, if I 
thought fit to take wine, it would be to kec]T uic 
sober. 

Among the gentlemen that I have liiiown, 
few, if any, were ruined by drinking. My few 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 201 

drunken acquaintances were generally ruined 
before they became drunkards. The habit of 
drinking is often a vice, no doubt, — sometimes 
a misfortune, — as when an almost irresistible 
hereditary propensity exists to indulge in it, — 
but oftenest of all a punishment. 

Empty heads, — heads without ideas in whole- 
some variety and sufficient number to furnish 
food for the mental clockwork, — ill-regulated 
heads, where the faculties are not under the 
control of the will, — these are the ones that 
hold the brains which their owners are so apt to 
tamper with, by introducing the appliances 
we have been talking about. Now, when a 
gentleman's brain is empty or ill-regulated, it 
is, to a great extent, his own fault; and so it is 
simple retribution, that, while he lies slothfully 
sleeping or aimlessly dreaming, the fatal habit 
settles on him like a vampire, and sucks his 
blood, fanning him all the while with its hot 
wings into deeper slumber or idler dreams! I 
am not such a hard-souled being as to apply this 
to the neglected poor, who have had no chance 
to fill their heads with wholesome ideas, and to 
be taught the lesson of self-government. I 
trust the tariif of Heaven has an ad valorem 
scale for them, — and all of us. 

But to come back to poets and artists; — if 
they really are more prone to the abuse of stim- 
ulants, — and I fear that this is time, — the reason 
of it is only too clear. A man abandons him- 
self to a fine frenzy, and the power which flows 
through him, as I once explained to you, makes 
liim the medium of a great poem or a great 
picture. The creativo action is not voluntary at 



202 THE AUTOCKAT OF THE 

all, but automatic; we can only put the mind 
into the proper attitude, and wait for the wind,, 
that blows where it listeth, to breathe over it. 
Thus the true state of creative genius is allied 
to reverie, or dreaming. If mind and body were 
both healthy, and had food enough and fair 
play, I doubt whether any men would be more 
temperate than the imaginative classes. But 
body and mind often flag, — perhaps they are ill- 
made to begin with, underfed with bread or 
ideas, overworked, or abused in some way. The 
automatic action, by which genius wTought its 
wonders, fails. There is only one thing which 
can rouse the machine; not will, — that cannot 
reach it; nothing but a ruinous agent, which 
hurries the wheels awhile and soon eats out the 
heart of the mechanism. The dreaming facul- 
ties are always the dangerous ones, because their 
mode of action can be imitated by artificial ex- 
citement; the reasoning ones are safe, because 
they imply continued voluntary effort. 

I think you will find it true, that, before any 
vice can fatten on a man, body, mind, or moral 
nature must be debilitated. The mosses and 
fungi gather on sickly trees, not thriving ones; 
and the odious parasites which fasten on the 
human frame choose that which is already en- 
feebled. Mr. Walker, the hygeian humorist, 
declared that he had such a healthy skin it was 
impossible for any impurity to stick to it, and 
maintained that it was an absurdity to wash a 
face which was of necessity always clean. I 
don't know how much fancy there was in this; 
but there is no fancy in sa3'ing that the lassi- 
tude of tired-out operatives,' and the languor of 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 203 

imaginative natures in their periods of collapse, 
*nd the vacuity of minds untrained to labor and 
discipline, fit the soul and body for the germ- 
ination of the seeds of intemperance. 

Whenever the wandering demon of Drunken- 
ness finds a ship adrift, — no steady wind in its 
sails, no thoughtful pilot directing its course, 
— he steps on board, takes the helm, and steers 
straight for the maelstrom. 

1 wonder if you know the terrible smile? 

[The young fellow whom they call John winked 
very hard, and made a jocular remark, the sense 
of which seemed to depend on some double 
meaning of the word smile. The company was 
curious to know what I meant.] 

There are persons — I said — who no sooner 
come within sight of you than they begin to 
smile, with an uncertain movement of the 
mouth, which conveys the idea that they are 
thinking about themselves, and thinking, too, 
that you are thinking they are thinking about 
themselves, — and so look at you with a 
wretched mixture of self-consciousness, awk- 
wardness, and attempts to carry off both, which 
are betrayed by the cowardly behavior of the 
eye and the tell-tale weakness of the lips that 
characterize these unfortunate beings. 

Why do you call them unfortunate, Sir? 

— asked the divinity-student. 

Because it is evident that the consciousness 
of some imbecility or other is at the bottom of 
this extraordinary expression. I don't think, 
however, that these persons nre commonly fools, 
I have known a number, and all of them were 



204 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

intelligent. I think nothing conveys the idea 
of underbreeding more than this self-betraying 
smile. Yet I think this peculiar habit, as well 
as that of meaningless Hushing, may be fallen 
into by very good people who meet often, or sit 
opposite each other at table. A true gentle- 
man's face is infinitely removed from all such 
paltriness, — calm-eyed, firm-mouthed. I think 
Titian understood the look of a gentleman as 
well as anybody that ever lived. The portrait 
of a young man holding a glove in his hand, in 
the Gallery of the Louvre, if any of you have 
seen that collection, will remind you of what I 
mean. 

Do I think these people know the pecul- 
iar look they have? — I cannot say; I hope not; 
I am afraid they would never forgive me, if they 
did. The worst of it is, the trick is catching; 
when one meets one of these fellows, he feels a 
tendency to the same manifestation. The Pro- 
fessor tells me there is a muscular slip, a de- 
pendence of the platysma myoides, which is 
called the risorius Santorini. 

Say that once more, — exclaimed the 

young fellow mentioned above. 

The Professor says there is a little fleshy slip 
called Santorini's laughing muscle. I would 
have it cut out of my face, if I were born with 
one of those constitutional grins upon it. Per- 
haps I am uncharitable in my judgment of 
those sour-looking people I told you of the 
other day, and of these smiling folks. It may 
be that they are born with these looks, as other 
people are with more generally recognized de- 
formities. Both are bad enough, but I had 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 205 

rather meet three of the scowlers than one of 
the smilers. 

There is another unfortunate way of 

looking, which is peculiar to that amiable sex 
we do not like to find fault with. There are 
some very pretty, but, unhappily, very ill-bred 
women, who don't understand the law of the 
road with regard to handsome faces. Nature 
and custom would, no doubt, agree in conced- 
ing to all males the right of at least two dis- 
tinct looks at every comely female countenance, 
without any infraction of the rules of courtesy 
or the sentiment of respect. The first look is 
necessary to define the person of the individual 
one meets, so as to avoid it in passing. Any un- 
usual attraction detected in a first glance is a 
sufficient apology for a second, — not a pro- 
longed and impertinent stare, but an appre- 
ciating homage of the eyes, such as a stranger 
may inoffensively yield to a passing image. It 
is astonishing how morbidly sensitive some vul- 
gar beauties are to the slightest demonstration 
of this kind. When a ladij walks the streets, she 
leaves her virtuous-indignation countenance 
at home; she knows well enough that the street 
is a picture-gallery, where pretty faces framed 
in pretty bonnets are meant to be seen, and 
everybody has a right to see them. 

When we observe how the same features 

and style of person and character descend from 
generation to generation, we can believe that 
some inherited weakness may account for these 
peculiarities. Little snapping-turtles snap — so 
the great naturalist tells us — before they are 
out of the egg-shell. I am satisfied, that, much 



206 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

higher up in the scale of life^ character is dis- 
tinctly shown at the age of — 2 or — 3 months. 

My friend, the Professor, has been full 

of eggs lately. [This remark excited a burst of 
hilarity, which I did not allow to interrupt the 
course of my observations.] He has been read- 
ing the great book where he found the fact 
about the little snapping-turtles mentioned 
above. Some of the things he has told me have 
suggested several odd analogies enough. 

There are half a dozen men, or so, who carry 
in their brains the ovarian eggs of the next 
generation's or century's civilization. These 
eggs are not ready to be laid in the form of 
books as yet; some of them are hardly ready to 
be put into the form of talk. But as rudimen- 
tary ideas or inchoate tendencies, there they 
are; and these are what must form the future. 
A man's general notions are not good for much, 
unless he has a crop of these intellectual ovar- 
ian eggs in his own brain, or knows them as 
they exist in the minds of others. One must 
be in the liahit of talking with such persons to 
get at these rudimentary germs of thought; 
for their development is necessarily imperfect, 
and they are molded on new patterns, which 
must be long and clasely studied. But these 
are the men to talk with. No fresh truth ever 
gets into a book. 

A good many fresh lies get in, anyhow, 

— said one of the company. 

I proceeded in spite of the interruption. — 
All uttered thought, my friend, the Professor, 
says, is of the nature of an excretion. Its ma- 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 207 

terials have been taken in, and have acted upon 
the system, and been reacted on by it; it has 
circulated and done its office in one mind be- 
fore it is given out for the benefit of others. It 
may be milk or venom to other minds; but, in 
either case, it is something which the producer 
has had the use of and can part with. A man 
instinctively tries to get rid of his thought in 
conversation or in print so soon as it is matured; 
but it is hard to get at it as it lies imbedded, a 
mere potentiality, the germ of a germ, in his 
intellect. 

Where are the brains that are fullest of 

these ovarian eggs of thought? — I decline men- 
tioning individuals. The producers of thought, 
who are few, the " jobbers " of thought, who 
are many, and the retailers of thought, who are 
numberless, are so mixed up in the popular 
apprehension, that it would be hopeless to try 
to separate them before opinion has had time to 
settle. Follow the course of opinion on the 
great subjects of human interests for a few gen- 
erations or centuries, get its parallax, map out 
a small arc of its movement, see where it tends, 
and then see who is in advance of it or even 
with it; the world calls him hard names, 
probably; but if you would find the oca of the 
future, you must look into the folds of his cere- 
bral convolutions. 

[The divinity-student looked a little puzzled 
at this suggestion, as if he did not see exactly 
where he was to come out, if he computed his 
arc too nicely. I think it possible it might cut 
off a few corners of his present belief, as it has 



i08 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

cut off martyr-burning and witch-hanging; — ^ 
but time will show, — time will show, as the old 
gentleman opposite says.] 

Oh, — here is that copy of verses 1 told 

you about. 

SPRING HAS COME. 

Int7'a Muros. 

The sunbeams, lost for half a year, 

Slant through my pane their morning rays; 

I'or dry Northwesters cold and clear. 
The East blows in its thin blue haze. 

And first the snowdrop's bells are seen, 
Then close ag-ainst the sheltering wall 

The tulip's horn of dusky green. 
The peony's dark unfolding ball. 

The golden-ehaliced crocus burns; 

The long narcissus-blades appear; 
The cone-beaked hyacinth returns. 

And lights her blue-flamed chandelier. 

The willow's whistling lashes, wrung 
By the wild winds of gusty jSIarch, 

With sallow leaflets lightly strung, 
Are swaying by the tufted larch. 

The elms have robed their slender spray 
With full-blown flower and embryo leaf; 

Wide o'er the clasping arch of day 
Soars like a cloud their hoary chief. 

[See the proud tulip's flaunting cup, 

That flames in glory for an hour, — 

Behold it withering, — then look up, — 
How meek the forest-monarch's flower! — 

When wake the violets, Winter dies; 

When sprout the elm-buds. Spring is near; 
When lilacs blossom. Summer cries, 

"Bud, little roses! Spring is here! "] 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 209 

The windows blush with fresh bouquets, 
Cut with ihe May-dew on their lips; 

The radish all its bloom displays, 
Pink as Aurora's finger tips. 

Nor less the flood of light that showers 
On beauty's changed corolla-shades, — 

The walks are gay as bridal bowers 
With rows of many-petaled maids. 

\ 
The scarlet shell-fish click and clash 

In the blue barrow where they slide; 
The horseman, proud of streak and splash, 

Creeps homeward from his morning' ride. 

Here comes the dealer's awkward string, 
With neck in rope and "^ail in knot, — 

Rough colts, with careless country-swing, 
In lazy walk or slouching trot. 

Wild filly from the mountain-side, 

Doomed to the close and chafing thills. 

Lend me thy long, untiring stride 
To seek with thee thy western hills! 

I hear the whispering voice of Spring, 
The thrush's trill, the cat-bird's cry. 

Like some poor bird with prisoned wing 
That sits and sings, but longs to fly. 

Oh for one spot of living green, — 

One little spot w^here leaves can grow, — • 

To love unblamed, to walk unseen, 
To dream above, to sleep below! 



IX. 

[Aqui estd encerrada el alma del licenciado 
Pedro Garcias.] 

If I should ever make a little book out of 
these papers, which I hope you are not getting 



210 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

tired of, I suppose I ought to save the above 
sentence for a motto on the title-page. But I 
want it now, and must use it. I need not say 
to you that the words are Spanish, nor that they 
are to be found in the short Introduction to 
" Gil Bias," nor that they mean, " Here lies 
buried the soul of the licentiate Pedro Garcias." 

I warned all young people off the premises 
when I began my notes referring to old age. I 
must be equally fair with old people now. 
They are earnestly requested to leave this paper 
to young persons from the age of twelve to that 
of four-score years and ten, at which latter 
period of life I am sure that I shall have at 
least one youthful reader. You know well 
enough what I mean by youth and age; — some- 
thing in the soul, which has no more to do with 
the color of the hair than the vein of gold in 
a rock has to do with the grass a thousand feet 
above it. 

I am growing bolder as I write. I think it 
requires not only youth, but genius, to read this 
paper. I don't mean to imply that it required 
any whatsoever to talk Avhat I have here written 
down. It did demand a certain amount of 
memory, and such command of the English 
tongue as is given by a common school educa- 
tion. So much I do claim. But here I have 
related, at length, a string of trivialities. You 
must have the imagination of a poet to trans- 
figure them. These little colored patches are 
stains upon the windows of a human soul; stand 
on the outside, they are but dull and meaning- 
less spots of color; seen from within, they are 



i 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 211 

glorified sliapes with empurpled wings and sun- 
bright aureoles. 

My hand trembles when I offer you this. 
Many times I have come bearing flowers such 
as my garden grew; but now I offer you this 
poor, brown, homely growth, you may cast it 
away as worthless. And yet — and yet — it is 
something better than flowers; it is a seed-cap- 
sule. Many a gardener will cut you a bouquet 
of his choicest blossoms for small fee, but he 
do€S not love to let the seeds of his rarest varie- 
ties go out of his own hands. 

It is by little things that we know ourselves; 
a soul would very probably mistake itself for 
another, when once disembodied, were it not 
for individual experiences that differed from 
those of others only in details seemingly tri- 
fling. All of us have been thirsty thousands 
of times, and felt, with Pindar, that w^ater was 
the best of things. I alone, as I think, of all 
mankind, remember one particular pailful of 
water, flavored with the white-pine of which the 
pail was made, and the brown mug out of which 
one Edmund, a red-faced and curly-haired boy, 
was averred to have bitten a fragment in his 
haste to drink; it being then high summer, and 
little full-blooded boys feeling very warm and 
porous in the low " studded " school-room 
where Dame Prentiss, dead and gone, ruled over 
young children, many of whom are old ghosts 
now, and have known Abraham for twenty or 
thirty years of our mortal time. 

Thirst belontrs to humanity, everywhere, in 
all ages; but that white-pine pail and that 



212 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

brown mug belong to me in particular; and just 
so of my special relationships with other things 
and with my race. One could never remember 
himself in eternity by the mere fact of having 
loved or hated any more than by that of having 
thirsted; love and hate have no more individu- 
ality in them than single waves in the ocean; — 
but the accidents or trivial marks which dis- 
tinguished those whom we loved or hated make 
their memory our own forever, and with it that 
of our own personality also. 

Therefore, my aged friend of five-and- 
twenty, or thereabouts, pause at the thresh- 
old of this particular record, and ask your- 
self seriously whether you are fit to read 
such revelations as are to follow. For observe, 
you have here no splendid array of petals 
such as poets offer you, — nothing but a diy 
shell, containing, if you will get out what 
is in it, a few small seeds of poems. You 
may laugh at them, if you like. I shall 
never tell you what I think of you for so doing. 
But if you can read into the heart of these 
things, in the light of other memories as slight, 
yet as dear to your soul, then you are neither 
more nor less than a Poet, and can afford to 
write no more verses during the rest of your 
natural life, — which abstinence I take to be one 
of the surest marks of your meriting the divine 
name I have just bestowed upon you. 

l\Iay I beg of you who have begun this paper, 
nobly trusting to your own imagination and 
se"n«ibilities to give it the si^i-nificance which it 
does not la}^ claim to without your kind assist- 
ance, — may I beg of you, I say, to pay particu- 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 21$ 

lar attention to the brackets which inclose 
certain paragraphs? I want my " asicfes/' you 
see, to whisper loud to you who read my notes, 
and sometimes I talk a page or two to you 
without pretending that I said a word of it to 
our boarders. You will find a very long 
"' aside " to you almost as soon as you begin to 
read. And so, dear young friend, fall to at 
once, taking such things as I have provided 
for you; and if you turn them, by the aid of 
your powerful imagination, into a fair ban 
quet, why, then, peace be with you, and a sum 
mer by the still waters of some quiet river, oj 
by some yellow beach, where, as my friend, th 
Professor, says, you can sit with Nature's wris^ 
in your hand and count her ocean-pulses.] 

I should like to make a few intimate revela- 
tions relating especially to my early life, if I 
thought you would like to hear them. 

[The schoolmistress turned a little in her 
chair, and sat with her face directed partly to- 
ward me. — Half -mourning now; — purple rib- 
bon. That breastpin she wears has graij hair 
in it; her mother's, no doubt; — I remember our 
landlady's daughter telling me, soon after the 
schoolmistress came to board v>^ith us, that she 
had lately " buried a payrent." That's what 
made her look so pale, — kept the poor sick 
tiling alive with her own blood. Ah! long ill- 
ness is the real vampirism; think of living a 
year or two after one is dead, by sucking the 
life-blood out of a frail young creature at one's 
bedside! — Well, soids grow white, as well as 
cheeks, in tliese lioly duties; one that goes in 
a nurse may come out r.n angel. — God bless al] 



214 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

good women! — to their soft hands and pitying 
hearts we must all come at last! The school- 
mistress has a better color than when she came. 

Too late! " It might have been." 

Amen! 



f 



How many thoughts go to a dozen heart- 
beats, sometimes! There was no long pause 
after my remark addressed to the company, but 
in that time I had the train of ideas and feel- 
ings I have just given flash through my con- 
sciousness sudden and sharp as the crooked red 
streak that springs out of its black sheath like 
the creese of a Malay in his death-race, and 
stabs the earth right and left in its blind rage. 

I don't deny that there was a pang in it, — 
yes, a stab; but there was a prayer, too, — the 
" Amen " belonged to that. — Also, a vision of 
a four-story brick house, nicely furnished, — I 
actually saw many specific articles, — curtains, 
sofas, tables, and others, and could draw the 
patterns of them at this moment, — a brick 
house, I say, looking out on the water, with a 
fair parlor, and books and busts and pots of 
flowers and bird-cages, all complete; and at the 
window, looking on the water, two of us. 
" Male and female created He them." — These 
two were standing at the window, when a little 
boy that was playing near them looked up at 

me with such a look that I poured out 

a glass of water, drank it all down, and then| 
continued.] 

I said I should like to tell you some things,! 
such as people commonly never tell, about my 
early recollections. Should you like to heal] 
them? 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 215 

Should we like to hear them? — said the 
schoolmistress; — no, but we should love to. 

[The voice was a sweet one, naturally, and 
had something very pleasant in its tone, just 
then. — The four-story brick house, which had 
gone out like a transparency when the light be- 
hind it is quenched, glimmered again for a 
moment; parlor, books, busts, flower-pots, 
bird-cages, all complete, — and the figures as 
before.] 

We are waiting with eagerness. Sir, — said 
the divinity-student. 

[The transparency went out as if a flash of 
black lightning had struck it.] 

If you want to hear my confessions, the 
next thing — I said — is to know whether I can 
trust you with them. It is only fair to say 
that there are a great many people in the world 
that laugh at such things. / think they are 
fools, but perhaps you don't all agree with me. 

Here are children of tender age talked to as 
if they were capable of understanding Calvin's 
" Institutes/' and nobody has honesty or sense 
enough to tell the plain truth about the little 
wretches; that they are as superstitious as 
naked savages, and such miserable spiritual 
cowards — that is, if they have any imagination 
— that they will believe anything which is 
taught them, and a great deal more which they 
teach themselves. 

I was born and bred, as I have told you 
twenty times, among books and those who 
knew what was in books. I was carefully in- 
-tructod in things temporal and spiritual. But 
vip to a considerable maturity of childhood I 



216 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

believed Eaphael and Michael Angelo to have 
been super-human beings. The central doc- 
trine of the prevalent religious faith of Christ- 
endom was utterly confused and neutralized in 
my mind for years by one of those com- 
mon stories of actual life, which I overheard 
repeated in a whisper. — Why did I not ask? 
you will say. — You don't remember the rosy 
pudency of sensitive children. The first in- 
stinctive movement of the little creatures is to 
make a cache, and bury in it beliefs, doubts, 
dreams, hopes, and terrors. I am uncovering 
one of these caches. Do you think I was neces- 
sarily a greater fool and coward than another? 

1 was afraid of ships. Why, I never could 
tell. The masts looked frightfully tall, — but 
they were not so tall as the steeple of our old 
yellow meeting-house. At any rate, I used to 
hide my eyes from the sloops and schooners 
that were wont to lie at the end of the bridge, 
and I confess that traces of this undefined ter- 
ror lasted very long. — One other source of 
alarm had a still more fearful significance» 
There was a great wooden hand, — a giove- 
maker's sign, which used to swing and creak in 
the blast, as it hung from a pillar before a cer- 
tain shop a mile or two outside of the city. 
Oh, the dreadful hand! Always hanging there 
ready to catch up a little boy, who would come 
home to supper no more, nor yet to bed. — ■ 
whose porringer would be laid away ('ni;ity 
thence fortii. and his half-worn shoes wait iTitil 
his small brotlier grew to fit them. 

As for all manner of superstitious observ- 
ances, I used once to think I must have been 



BKEAKl^'AST TABLE. 217 

peculiar in having such a hst of them, but I 
now beUeve that half the children of the same 
age go through the same experiences. No Ko- 
man soothsayer ever had such a catalogue of 
omens as I found in the Sibylline leaves of my 
childhood. That trick of throwing a stone at 
a tree and attaching some mighty issue to hit- 
ting or missing, which you will find mentioned 
in one or more biographies, I well remember. 
Stepping on or over certain particular things 
or spots — Dr. Johnson's especial weakness — I 
got the habit of at a very early age. — I won't 
swear that I have not some tendency to these 
not wise practices even at this present date. 
[IJow many of you that read these notes can 
say the same thing.] 

With these follies mingled sweet delusions, 
which I loved so well I would not outgrow 
them, even when it required a voluntary effort 
to put a momentary trust in them. Here is 
one which I cannot help telling you. 

The firing of the great guns at the Navy- 
yard is easily heard at the place where I 
was born and lived. " There is a ship of 
war come in," they used to say, when they 
heard them. Of course, I supposed that such 
vessels came in unexpectedly, after indefinite 
years of absence, — suddenly as falling stones; 
and that the great guns roared in their 
astonishment and delight at the sight of the 
old war-ship splitting the bay with her cut- 
water. Now, the sloop-of-war the Wasp, 
Captain Blakeley, after gloriously capturing 
the Beindeer and the Avon, had disappeared 
from the face of the ocean, and was supposed 



218 THE AUTOCKAT OF THE 

to be lost. But there was no proof of it, and, 
of course, for a time, hopes were entertained 
that she might be heard from. Long after the 
last real chance had utterly vanished, 1 pleased 
myself with the fond illusion that somewliere 
on the waste of waters she was still floating, 
and there were years during which I never 
heard the sound of the great guns booming in- 
land from the Navy-yard without saying to 
myself, " The Wasp has come! " and almost 
thinking I could see her, as she rolled in, 
crumpling the water before her, weather- 
beaten, barnacled, with shattered spars and 
threadbare canvas, welcomed by the shouts and 
tears of thousands. This was one of those 
dreams that I nursed and never told. Let me 
make a clean breast of it now, and say, that, so 
late as to have outgrown childhood, perhaps to 
have got far on toward manhood, when the 
roar of the cannon has struck suddenly on my 
ear, I have started with a thrill of vague ex- 
pectation and tremulous delight, and the long- 
unspoken w^ords have articulated themselves in 
the mind's dumb whisper, The Wasp lias come! 

Yes, children believe plenty of queer 

things. I suppose all of you have had the 
pocket-book fever when you were little ? — What 
do I mean? Why, ripping up old pocket-books 
in the firm belief that bank-bills to an im- 
mense amount were hidden in them. — So, too,, 
you must all remember some splendid unful- 
filled promise of somebody or other, which fed 
you with hopes perhaps for years, and wliich 
left a blank in your life which nothing has ever 
filled up. — 0. T. quitted C'ur household carry- 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 219 

ing with him the passionate regrets of the more 
youthful members. He was an ingenious 
youngster; wrote wonderful copies, and carved 
the two initials given above with great skill on 
all available surfaces. I thought, by the way, 
they were all gone; but the other day I found 
them on a certain door which I will show you 
some time. How it surprised me to find them 
so near the ground! I had thought the boy of 
no trivial dimensions. Well, 0. T., when he 
wTut, made a solemn promise to two of us. I 
was to have a ship, and the other a mar^m- 
house (last syllable pronounced as in the word 
tin). Neither ever came; but, oh, how many 
and many a time I have stolen to the corner, — 
the cars pass close by it at this time, — and 
looked up that long avenue, thinking that he 
must be coming now, almost sure, as I turned 
to look northward, that there he would be, 
trudging toward me, the ship in one hand and 
the mar^i^i-house in the other! 

[You must not suppose that all I am going 
to say, as well as all I have said, was told to the 
whole company. The young fe.x;nv v/hom they 
call John was in the yard, sitting on a barrel 
and smoking a cheroot, the fumes of which 
came in, not ungrateful, through the open win- 
dow. The divinity-student disappeared in the 
midst of our talk. The poor relation in black 
bombazine, w^ho looked and moved as if all her 
articulations were elbow-joints, had gone off 
to her chamber, after waiting with a look of 
soul -subduing decorum at the foot of the stairs 
until one of the male sort hnd passed her and 
ascended into the upper regions. This is a 



220 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

famous point of etiquette in our boarding- 
house; in fact, between ourselves, they make 
such an awful fuss about it, that I, for one, had 
a great deal rather have them simple enough 
not to think of such matters at all. Our land- 
lady's daughter said, the other evening, that she 
was going to '' retire "; whereupon the young 
fellow called John took up a lamp and insisted 
on lighting her to the foot of the staircase. 
Nothing wouM induce her to pass by him, un- 
til the schoolmistress, saying in good plain 
English that it was her bed- time, walked 
straight by them both, not seeming to trouble 
herself about either of them. 

I have been led away from wdiat I meant the 
portion included in these brackets to inform 
my readers about. I say, then, most of the 
boarders had left the table about the time when 
I began telling some of these secrets of mine, 
— all of them, in fact, but the old gentleman 
opposite and the schoolmistress. I understand 
why a young woman should like to hear these 
homely but genuine experiences of early life, 
which are, as I have said, the little brown seeds 
of what may yet grow to be poems with leaves 
of azure and gold; but when the old gentleman 
pushed up his chair nearer to me, and slanted 
around his best ear, and once, when I was 
speaking of some trifling, tender reminiscence, 
drew a long breath, with such a tremor in it 
that a little more and it would have been a sob, 
why, then I felt there must be somethinp: of 
nature in them Avhich redeemed their seeming 
insignificance. Tell me, man or woman witli 
whom I am whispering, have you not a small 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 221 

store of recollections, such as these I am uncov- 
ering, buried beneath the dead leaves of many 
summers, perhaps under the unmelting snows 
of fast-returning winters, — a few such recollec- 
tions, which, if you should write them all out, 
would be swept into some careless editor's 
drawer, and might cost a scanty half-hour's lazy 
reading to his subscribers, — and yet, if Death 
should cheat you of them, you would not know 
yourself in eternity?] 

1 made three acquaintances at a very 

early period of life, my introduction to whom 
was never forgotten. The first unequivocal act 
of vv"rong that has left its trace in my memory 
was this: it was refusing a small favor asked of 
me, — nothing more than telling what had hap- 
pened at school one morning. No matter who 
asked it; but there were circumstances which 
saddened and awed me. I had no heart to 
speak; — I faltered some miserable, perhaps 
petulant excuse, stole away, and the first battle 
of life was lost. What remorse followed I need 
not tell. Then and there, to the best of my 
knowledge, I first consciously took Sin by the 
hand and turned my back on Duty. Time has 
led me to look upon my offense more leniently; 
I do not believe it or any other childish wrong 
is infinite, as some have pretended, but infin- 
itelv finite. Yet, oh, if I had but won that 
battle! 

The o-rcat Destro3^er, whose awful shadow it 
w;)s that had silenced me, came near me, 
— but never, so as to be distinctly seen and 
remembered during my tender years. There 
flits dimly before me the image of a little 



222 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

girl, whose name even I have forgotten, a 
schoolmate, whom we missed one day, and 
were told that she had died. But what 
death was I never had any very distinct idea^ 
until one day I climbed the low stone wall 
of the old burial-ground and mingled with a 
group that were looking into a very deep, long^ 
narrow hole, dug down through the green sod, 
down through the brown loam, down through 
the yellow gravel, and there at the bottom was 
an oblong red box, and a still, sharp, white 
face of a young man seen through an opening 
at one end of it. When the lid was closed, and 
the gravel and stones rattled down pell-mellj 
and the woman in black, who was cr3dng and 
wringing her hands, went off with the other 
mourners, and left them, then I felt that I had 
seen Death, and should never forget him. 

One other acquaintance I made at an earlier 
period of life than the habit of romancers 
authorizes. — Love, of course. — She was a fa- 
mous beauty afterward. — I am satisfied that 
many children rehearse their parts in the drama 
of life before they have shed all their milk- 
teeth. — I think I won't tell the story of the 
golden blonde. — I suppose everybody has had 
his childish fancies; but sometimes they are 
passionate impulses, which anticipate all the 
tremulous emotions belonging to a later period. 
Most children remember seeing and adoring an 
angel before they were a dozen years old. 

[The old gentleman had left his chair oppo- 
site and taken a seat by the schoolmistress and 
myself, a little way from the table. — It's true, 
it's true, — said the old gentleman. — He took 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 22^ 

hold of a steel watch-chain, which carried a 
large, square gold key at one end and was sup- 
posed to have some kind of timekeeper at the 
other. With some trouble he dragged up an 
ancient-looking, thick, silver, bull's-eye watch. 
He looked at it for a moment, — hesitated, — 
touched the inner corner of his right eye with 
the pulp of his middle finger, looked at the 
face of the watch, — said it was getting into the 
forenoon, — then opened the watch and handed 
me the loose outside case without a word. — 
The watch-paper had been pink once, and had 
a faint tinge still, as if all its tender life had not 
yet quite faded out. Two little birds, a flower, 
and, in small school-girl letters, a date^ — 
17 . . — no matter. — Before I was thirteen years 

old, — said the old gentleman. 1 don't know 

what was in that young schoolmistress's head^ 
nor why she should have done it; but she took 
out the watch-paper and put it softly to her 
lips, as if she were kissing the poor thing that 
made it so long ago. The old gentleman took 
the watch-paper carefully from her, replaced it, 
turned away and walked out, holding the watch 
in his hand. I saw him pass the window a 
moment after with that foolish white hat on 
his head; he couldn't have been thinking what 
he was about when he put it on. So the school- 
mistress and I were left alone. I drew my 
chair a shade nearer to her, and continued.] 

And since I am talking of early recollections, 
I don't know why I shouldn't mention some 
others that still cling to me, — not that you will 
attach any very particular meaning to these 
^p.To.Q iTnaTC? so ful^. of significance to me, but 



224 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

that you. will find something parallel to them in 
your own memory. Yon remember, perhaps, 
what I said one day about smells. There were 
certain sounds also which had a mysterious 
suggestiveness to me, — not so intense, perhaps, 
as that connected with the other sense, but yet 
peculiar, and never to be forgotten. 

The first was the creaking of the wood-sleds, 
bringing their loads of oak and walnut from the 
country, as the slow-swinging oxen trailed 
them along over the complaining snow in the 
cold, brown light of early morning. Lying in 
bed and listening to their dreary music had a 
pleasure in it akin to that which Lucretius de- 
scribes in witnessing a ship toiling through the 
waves while we sit at ease on shore, or that 
which Byron speaks of as to be enjoyed in look- 
ing on at a battle by one " who hath no friend, 
no brother there." 

There was another sound, in itself so sweet, 
and so connected with one of those simple and 
curious superstitions of childhood of which I 
have spoken, that I can never cease to cherish 
a sad sort of love for it. — Let me tell the super- 
stitious fancy first. The Puritan " Sabbath,'^ 
as everybody knows, began at " sundown " on 
Saturday evening. To such observance of it I 
was born and bred. As the large, round disk 
of day declined, a stillness, a solemnity, a some- 
what melancholy hush came over us all. It was 
time for work to cease, and for playthings to be 
put away. The world of active life passed into 
the vshadow of an eclipse, not to emerge until 
the sun should sink again beneath the horizon. 



BREAKFAST TABLE. i^2o 

It was in this stillness of the world without 
*ind of the soul within that the pulsating lul- 
laby of the evening crickets used to make itself 
most distinctly heard, — so that I well remem-- 
ber I used to think that the purring of these 
little creatures, which mingled with the batra- 
chian hymns from the neighboring swamp^ 
was peculiar to Saturday evenings. I don't 
know that anything could give a clearer idea 
of the quieting and subduing effect of the old 
habit of observance of what was considered 
holy time, than this strange, childish fancy. 

Yes, and there was still another sound which 
mingled its solemn cadences with the waking 
and sleeping dreams of my boyhood. It was 
heard only at times, — a deep, muffled roar^ 
which rose and fell, not loud, but vast, — a 
whistling boy would have drowned it for Ms 
next neighbor, but it must have been heard 
over the space of a hundred square miles. I 
used to wonder what this might be. Could it 
be the roar of the thousand wheels and the ten 
thousand footsteps jarring and tramping along 
the stones of the neighboring city? That 
would be continuous; but this, as I have said^ 
rose and fell in regular rhythm. I remember 
being told, and I suppose this to have been the 
true solution, that it was the sound of the 
waves, after a high wind, breaking on the long 
beaches many miles distant. I should really 
like to know whether any observing people liv- 
ing ten miles, more or less, inland from long 
beaches, — in such a town, for instance, as Can- 
tabridge, in the eastern part of the Territor}? 



:226 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

of Massachusetts, — have ever observed any 
such sound, and whether it was rightly ac- 
counted for as above. 

Minghng with these inarticulate sounds in 
the low murmur of memory are the echoes of 
certain voices I have heard at rare intervals. 
I grieve to say it, but our people, I think, have 
not generally agreeable voices. The marrowy 
•organisms, with sldns that shed w^ater like the 
backs of ducks, with smooth surfaces neatly 
padded beneath, and velvet linings to their 
singing-pipes, are not so common among us as 
that other pattern of humanity with angular 
outlines and plane surfaces, arid integuments, 
hair like the fibrous covering of a cocoa-nut in 
gloss and suppleness as well as color, and voices 
<at once thin and strenuous, — acidulous enough 
to produce effervescence with alkalis, and strid- 
ulous enough to sing duets with the katydids. 
I think our conversational soprano, as some- 
tim.es overheard in the cars, arising from a 
group of young persons, who may have taken 
the train at one of our great industrial centers, 
for instance, — young persons of the female ,sex, 
we will say, who have bustled in full-dressed; 
engaged in loud strident speech, and who, after 
free discussion, have fixed on two or more 
double seats, which having secured, they pro- 
ceed to eat apples and hand round daguerreo- 
types, — I say. I think the conversational so- 
prano, heard under these circumstances, would 
not be among the allurements tlie old Enemy 
would put in requisition, were he getting up a 
new temptation of St. Anthony. 

There are sweet voices among us, we all 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 22? 

know, and voices not musical, it may be, to 
those who hear them for the first time, yet 
sweeter to us than any we shall hear until we 
listen to some warbling angel in the overture 
to that eternity of blissful harmonies we hope 
to enjoy. — But why should I tell lies? If my 
friends love me, it is because I try to tell the 
truth. I never heard but two voices in my life 
that frightened me by their sweetness. 

Frightened you? — said the schoolmis- 
tress. — Yes, frightened me. They made me 
feel as if there might be constituted a creature 
with such a chord in her voice to some string 
in another's soul, that, if she but spoke, he 
would leave all and follow her, though it were 
into the jaws of Erebus. Our only chance to 
keep our wits is, that there are so few natural 
chords between others' voices and this string 
in our souls, and that those which at first may 
have jarred a little by and by come into har- 
mony with it. — But I tell you this is no fiction. 
You may call the story of Ulysses and the 
Sirens a fable, but what will you say to Mario 
and the poor lady who followed him? 

Whose were those two voices that be- 
witched me so? — They both belonged to Ger- 
man women. One was a chambermaid, not 
otherwise fascinating. The key of my room 
at a certain great hotel was missing, and this 
Teutonic maiden was summoned to give in- 
formation respecting it. The simple soul was 
evidently not long from her motherland, and 
spoke with sweet uncertainty of dialect. But 
to hear her wonder and lament and suggest, 
with soft, liquid inflections, and low, sad mur- 



228 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

murs, in tones as full of serious tenderness for 
the fate of the lost key as if it had been a child 
that had strayed from its mother, was so win- 
ning, that, had her features and figure been as 
delicious as her accents, — if she had looked 
like the marble Clytie, for instance, — why, all 
I can say is 

[The schoolmistress opened her eyes so 
wide, that I stopped short.] 

I was only going to say that I should have 
drowned myself. For Lake Erie was close by, 
and it is so much better to accept asphyxia, 
which takes only three minutes by the watch, 
than a mesalliance, that lasts fifty years to begin 
with, and then passes along down the line of de- 
scent, (breaking out in all manner of boorish 
manifestations of feature and manner, which, 
if men were only as short-lived as horses, could 
be readily traced back through the square-roots 
and the cube-roots of the family stem, on which 
you have hung the armorial bearings of the De 
Champignons or the De la Morues, until one 
came to beings that ate with knives and said 
^^Haow?") that no person of right feeling 
could have hesitated for a single moment. 

The second of the ravishing voices I have 
heard was, as I have said, that of another Ger- 
man woman. — I suppose I shall ruin myself by 
saying that such a voice could not have come 
from any Americanized human being. 

What was there in it? — said the school- 
mistress, — and, upon my word, her tones were 
so very musical, that I almost wished I had 
^aid three voices instead of two, and not made 
the unpatriotic remark above reported. — Oh, I 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 229 

said, it had so much woman in it, — muliebrity^ 
as well as femineity; — no self-assertion, such 
as free suffrage introduces into every word and 
movement; large, vigorous nature, running 
back to those huge-limbed Germans of Taci- 
tus, but subdued by the reverential training 
and tuned by the kindly culture of fifty gen- 
erations. Sharp business habits, a lean soil, in- 
dependence, enterprise, and east winds, are not 
the best things for the larynx. Still, you hear 
noble voices among us, — I have known families 
famous for them, — but ask the first person you 
meet a question, and ten to one there is a hard, 
sharp, metallic, matter-of-business clink in the 
accents of the answer, that produces the effect 
of one of those bells which small trades-people 
connect with their shop-doors, and which 
spring upon your ear with such vivacity, as you 
enter, that your first impulse is to retire at once 
from the precincts. 

Ah, but I must not forget that dear 

little child I saw and heard in a French hos- 
pital. Between two and three years old. Fell 
out of her chair and snapped both thigh bones. 
Lying in bed, patient, gentle. Kough students 
round her, some in white aprons, looking fear- 
fully business-hke; but the child placid, per- 
fectly still. I spoke to her, and the blessed 
little creature answered me in a voice of such 
heavenly sweetness, with that reedy thrill in it 
which you have heard in the thrush's even- 
song, that I. hear it at this moment, while I am 
writing, so many, many years afterward. — 
C'est tout comme U7i serin, said the French stu« 
dont at my side. 



•230 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

These are the voices which struck the key« 
note of my conceptions as to what the sounds 
we are to hear in heaven will be, if we shall 
enter through one of the twelve gates of pearl. 
There must be other things besides aerolites 
that wander from their own spheres to ours; 
and when we speak of celestial sweetness or 
beauty, we may be nearer the literal truth than 
\ve dream. If mankind generally are the ship- 
wrecked survivors of some pre-Adamitic cata- 
clysm, set adrift in these little open boats of 
humanity to make one more trial to reach the 
shore, — as some grave theologians have main- 
tained, — if, in plain English, men are the 
ghosts of dead devils who have " died into 
life," (to borrow an expression from Keats,) 
and walk the earth in a suit of living rags that 
lasts three or four score summers, — why, there 
must have been a few good spirits sent to keep 
them company, and these sweet voices I speak 
of must belong to them. 

1 wish you could once hear my sister's 

voice, — said the schoolmistress. 

If it is like yours, it must be a pleasant one, 
— said I. 

I never thought mine was anything, — said 
the schoolmistress. 

How should you know? — said I. — People 
never hear their own voices, — any more than 
they see their own faces. There is not even 
a looking-glass for the voice. Of course, there 
is something audible to us when we speak; but 
ihat something is not our own voice as it is 
known to all our acquaintances. I think, if an 
image sj)oke to us in our own tones, we should 



BREAKFAST EABLE. 231 

not know them in the least. — How pleasant it 
would be, if in another state of being we could 
have shapes like our former selves for play- 
things, — we standing outside or inside of them, 
as we liked, and they being to us just what we 
used to be to others! 

1 wonder if there will be nothing like 

what we call ^' play," after our earthly toys are 
broken, — said the schoolmistress. 

Hush, — said I, what will the divinity-stu- 
dent say? 

[I thought she was hit, that time; — but the 
shot must have gone over her, or on one side 
of her; she did not flinch.] 

Oh, — said the schoolmistress, — he must look 
out for my sister's heresies; I am afraid he will 
be too busy with them to take care of mine. 

Do you mean to say, — said I, — that it is your 
sister whom that student— 

[The young fellow commonly known as 
John, who had been sitting on the barrel, 
smoking, jumped off just then, kicked over 
the barrel, gave it a push with his foot that set 
it rolling, and stuck his saucy-looking face in 
at the window so as to cut my question off in 
the middle; and the schoolmistress leaving the 
room a few minutes afterward, I did not have 
a chance to finish it. 

The young fellow came in and sat down in a 
chair, putting his heels on the top of another. 

Pooty girl, — said he. 

A fine young lady, — I replied. 

Keeps a fust-rate school, according to ac- 
counts, — said he, — teaches all sorts of things, 
— Latin and Italian and music. Folks rich 



232 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

once, — smashed up. She went right ahead as 
smart as if she'd been born to work. That's 
the kind o' girl I go for. I'd marry her, only 
two or three other girls would drown them- 
selves, if I did. 

I think the above is the longest speech of 
this young fellow's which I have put on record. 
I do not like to change his peculiar expres- 
sions, for this is one of those cases in which 
the style is the man, as M. de Buffon says. The 
fact is, the young fellow is a good-hearted crea- 
ture enough, only too fond of his jokes, — and 
if it were not for those heat-lightning winks 
on one side of his face, I should not mind his 
fun much.] 

[Some days after this, when the company 
were together again, I talked a little.] 

1 don't think I have a genuine hatred 

for anybody. I am well aware that I differ 
herein from the sturdy English moralist and 
the stout American tragedian. I don't deny 
that I hate the sight of certain people; but the 
qualities which make me tend to hate the man 
himself are such as I am so much disposed to 
pity, that, except under immediate aggravation, 
I feel kindly enough to the worst of them. It 
is such a sad thing to be born a sneaking fel- 
low, so much worse than to inherit a hump- 
back or a couple of club feet, that I sometimes 
feel as if we ought to love the crippled souls, 
if I may use that expression, with a certaiii t'^n- 
derness which we need not waste on noble 
natures. One who is born with such con- 
genital incapacity that nothing can make a 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 233 

gentleman of him is entitled, not to our wrath, 
but to our profoundest sympathy. But as we 
cannot help hating the sight of these people, 
just as we do that of physical deformities, we 
gradually eliminate them from our society, — 
we love them, but open the window and let 
them go. By the time decent people reach 
middle age they have weeded their circle 
pretty well of these unfortunates, unless they 
have a taste for such animals; in which case, 
no matter what their position may be, there is 
something, you may be sure, in their natures 
akin to that of their wretched parasites. 

The divinity-student wished to know 

what I thought of aifinities, as well as of antip- 
athies; did I beheve in love at first sight? 

Sir, — said I, — all men love all women. That 
is the primd-facie aspect of the case. The 
Court of Nature assumes the law to be, that all 
men do so; and the individual man is bound to 
show cause why he does not love any particu- 
lar woman. A man, says one of my old black- 
letter law-books, may show divers good reasons, 
as thus: He hath not seen the person named in 
the indictment; she is of tender age, or the 
reverse of that; she hath certain personal dis- 
qualifications, — as, for instance, she is a black- 
amoor, or hath an ill-favored countenance; or, 
his capacity of loving being limited, his affec- 
tions are engrossed by a previous comer; 
and so of other conditions. Not the less 
it is true that he is bound by duty and 
inclined by nature to love each and every 
woman. Therefore it is that each woman 
virtually summons every man to show cause 



234 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

why he doth not love her. This is not by 
written document, or direct speecli, for the 
most part, but by certain signs of silk, gold, 
and other materials, which say to all men,. 
— Look on me and love, as in duty bound. 
Then the man pleadeth his special incapacity, 
whatsoever that may be, — as, for instance, 
impecuniosity, or that he hath one or many 
wives in his household, or that he is of mean 
figure, or small capacity; of which reasons it 
may be noted, that the first is, according to 
late decisions, of chiefest authority. — So far 
the old law-book. But there is a note from an 
older authority, saying that every woman doth 
also love each and every man, except there be 
some good reason to the contrary; and a very 
observing friend of mine, a young unmarried 
clergyman, tells me, that, so far as his experi- 
ence goes, he has reason to think the ancient 
author had fact to justify his statement. 

I'll tell you how it is with the pictures of 
women we fall in love with at first sight. 

We a'n't talking about pictures, — said 

the landlady's daughter, — we're talking about 
women. 

I understood that we were speaking about 
love at sight, — I remarked, mildly. — Now, as 
all a man knows about a woman whom he looks 
at is just what a picture as big as a copper or a 
" nickel," rather, at the bottom of his eye can 
teach him, I think I am right in saying we are 
talking about the pictures of women. — Well^ 
now, the reason why a man is not desperately 
in love with ten thousand women at once is 
just that which prevents all our portraits be- 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 235 

ing distinctly seen upon that wall. They all 
are painted there by reflection from our faces, 
but because all of them are painted on each 
spot, and each on the same surface, and many 
other objects at the same time, no one is seen as 
a picture. But darken a chamber and let a 
single pencil of rays in through a key-hole, 
then you have a picture on the wall. We 
never fall in love with a woman in distinction 
from women, until we can get an image 
of her through a pin-hole; and then we can see 
nothing else, and nobody but ourselves can see 
the image in our mental camera-obscura. 

My friend, the Poet, tells me he has to 

leave town whenever the anniversaries come 
round. 

What's the difficulty?— Why, they all want 
him to get up and make speeches, or songs, or 
toasts; which is just the very thing he doesn't 
want to do. He is an old story, he says, and 
hates to show on these occasions. But they 
tease him, and coax him, and can't do with- 
out him, and feel all over his poor weak head 
until they get their fingers on the fontanel, 
(the Professor will tell you what this means, — 
he says the one at the top of the head always 
remains open in poets,) until, by gentle pres 
sure on that soft pulsating spot, they stupefy 
him to the point of acquiescence. 

There are times, though, he says, when it is 
a pleasure, before going to some agreeable 
meeting, to rush out into one's garden and 
clutch up a handful of what grows there. — 
weeds and violets together, — not cutting them 
off. h^^i piillino; them np by the roots with the 



236 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

brown earth they grow in sticldng to them. 
That's his idea of a post-prandial performance. 
Look here, now. These verses I am going to 
read you, he tells me, were pulled up by the 
roots just in that way, the other day. — Beauti- 
ful entertainment, — names there on the plates 
that flow from all English-speaking tongues 
as familiarly as and or tfie; entertainers known 
wherever good poetry and far title-pages are 
held in esteem; guest a kind-hearted, modest, 
genial, hopeful poet, who sings to the hearts 
of his countrymen, the British people, the 
songs of good cheer which the better days to 
come, as all honest souls trust and believe, will 
turn into the prose of common life. My 
friend, the Poet, says you must not road such 
a string of verses too literally. If he trimmed 
it nicely below, you wouldn't see the roots, he 
says, and he likes to keep them, and a little 
of the soil clinging to them. 

This is the farewell my friend, the Poet, read 
to his and our friend, the Poet: — 

A GOOD TIME GOING! 

Brave sing-er of the coming- time, 

Sweet minstrel of the joyous present, 
Crowned with the noblest wreath of rhyme, 

The holly-leaf of Ayrshire's peasant, 
Good-by! Good-by! — Our hearts and hands, 

Our lips in honest Saxon phrases 
Cry, God be with him, till he stands 

His feet among- the Eng-lisL daisies! 

'Tis here we part; — for other eyes 

The busy deck, the fluttering- streamer, 

The dripping- arms that plung-e and rise, 
The waves in foam, the ship in tremor. 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 237 

The kerchiefs waving- from the pier, 
The cloudy pillar gliding" o'er him, 

The deep blue desert, lone and drear. 

With heaven above and home before him! 

His home!— the Western g-iant smiles. 

And twirls the spotty giobe to find it; — 
This little speck the British Isles? 

'Tis but a freckle, — never mind it! — 
He laughs, and all his prairies roll. 

Each gurg-ling- cataract roars and chuckles, 
And ridg-es stretched from pole to pole 

Heave till they crack their iron knuckles! 

But Memory blushes at the sneer. 

And Honor turns with frown defiant, 
And Freedom, leaning* on her spear, 

Laughs louder than the laughing giant; — 
" An islet is a world," she said, 

" When glory with its dust has blended, 
And Britain keeps her noble dead 

Till earth and seas and skies are rended! " 

Beneath each swinging forest-bough 

Some arm as stout in death reposes, — 
From wave-washed foot to heaven-kissed brow 

Her valor's life-blood runs in roses; 
Nay, let our brothers of the West 

Write smiling in their florid pages. 
One-half her soil has walked the rest 

In poets, heroes, martyrs, sages! 

Hugged in the clinging billow's clasp. 

From sea-weed fringe to mountain heather, 
The British oak with rooted grasp 

Her slender handful holds together; — 
With cliffs of white and bowers of green, 

And Ocean narrowing to caress her. 
And hills and threaded streams between, — 

Our little mother isle, God bless her! 

In earth V-, broad temple where we stand. 

Fanned by ih? ■,.;! ;■,•;! ;-"ales that brought us, 



238 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

We hold the missal in our hand, 

Bright with the lines our Mother taught us; 
Where'er its blazoned page betrays 

The glistening links ot gilded tetters, 
Behold, the half-turned leaf disf)lays 

Her rubric stained in crimson letters! 

Enough! To speed a parting friend 

'Tis vain alike to speak and listen; — 
Yet stay, — these feeble accents blend 

With rays of light from eyes that glisten. 
Good-by! once more, — and kindly tell 

In words of peace the young world's story, — 
And say, besides, — we love too well 

Our mothers' soil, our fathers' glory! 

When my friend^ the Professor^ found that 
my friend, the Poet^ had been coming out in 
this full-blown style, he got a little excited, as 
you may have seen a canary, sometimes, when 
another strikes up. The Professor says he 
knows he can lecture, and thinks he can write 
verses. At any rate, he has often tried, and 
now he was determined to try again. So when 
some professional friends of his called him up, 
one day, after a feast of reason and a regular 
" freshet ^' of soul which had lasted two or three 
hours, he read them these verses. He intro- 
duced them with a few remarks, he told me, of 
which the onl}^ one he remembered was this: 
that he had rather write a single line which 
one among them should think worth remember- 
ing than set them all laughing with a string of 
epigrams. It was all right, I don't doubt; at 
any rate, that was his fancy then, and perhaps 
another time he may be obstinately hilarious: 
however, it may be that he is growing gravi.T, 
for time is a fact so long as clocks and watches 



BRExVKFAST TABLE. 239" 

continue to go, and a cat can't be a kitten 
always, as the old gentleman opposite said the 
other day. 

You must listen to this seriously, for I 
think the Professor was very much in earnest 
when he wrote it. 

THE TWO AKMIES. 

As Life's unending- column pours. 
Two marshaled hosts are seen, — 

Two armies on the trampled shores 
That Death flows black between. 

One marches to the drum-beat's roll, 
The wide-niouthed clarion's bray, 

And bears upon a crimson scroll, 
" Our glory is to slay." 

One moves in silence by the stream, 

With sad, j^et watchful eyes. 
Calm as the patient planet's g-leam 

That w^alks the clouded skies. 

Along its front no sabers shine, 

No blood-red pennons wave; 
Its banner bears the single line, 

" Our duty is to save." 

For those no death-bed's lingering shade; 

At Honor's trumpet-call 
With knitted brow and lifted blade 

In Glory's arms they fall. 

For these no clashing 'falchions bright, 

No stirring battle-cry; 
The bloodless stabber calls by night, — 

Each answers, "Here am I! " 

For those the sculptor's laureled bust, 
. The builder's marble i^iles, 
The anthems pealing o'er their dust 
Through long- cathedral aisles. 



:240 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

For these the blossom-sprinkled turf 

That floods the lonely graves, 
When Spring- rolls in her sea-g-reen surf 

In flowery-foaming- waves. 

Two paths lead upward from below, 

And angels w^ait above, 
Who count each burning life-drop's flow, 

Each falling tear of Love. 

Though from the Hero's bleeding breast 

Her pulses Freedom drew. 
Though the white lilies in her crest 

Sprang from that scarlet dew, — 

While Valor's haughty champions wait 
Till all their scars are shown. 

Love walks unchallenged through the gate 
To sit beside the Throne. 



X. 

[The schoolmistress came down with a rose 
in her hair, — a fresh June rose. She has been 
walking early; she has brought back two 
others, — one on each cheek. 

I told her so, in some such pretty phrase as 
I could muster for the occasion. Those two 
blush-roses I just spoke of turned into a 
couple of damasks. I suppose all this went 
through my mind, for this was what I went on 
to say: — ] 

I love the damask rose best of all. The 
flowers our mothers and sisters used to love and 
cherish, those which grow beneath our eaves 
and by our doorstep, are the ones we always 
love best. If the Houyhnhnms should ever 
catch me, and, finding me particularly vicious 



EIIKAKFAST TABLE. 241 

and unmanageable, send a man-tamer to 
Kareyfy me, I'll tell you what drugs he would 
have to take and how he would have to use 
them. Imagine yourself reading a number of 
the Houylmhnms Gazette, "giving an account 
of such an experiment. 

" MAN-TAMING EXTKAOKDINAEY. 

" The soft-hoofed semi-quadruped recently 
captured was subjected to the art of our dis- 
tinguished man-tamer in presence of a numer- 
ous assembly. The animal was led in by two 
stout ponies, closely confined by straps to pre- 
vent his sudden and dangerous tricks of shoul- 
der-hitting and foot-striking. His counte- 
nance expressed the utmost degree of ferocity 
and cunning. 

" The operator took a handful of budding 
lilac-leaves, and crushing them slightly between 
his hoofs, so as to bring out their peculiar fra- 
grance, fastened them to the end of a long pole 
and held them toward the creature. Its ex- 
pression changed in an instant, — it drew in 
their fragrance eagerly, and attempted to seize 
them with its soft split hoofs. Having thus 
quieted his suspicious subject, the operator pro- 
ceeded to tie a blue hyacinth to the end of the 
pole and held it out toward the wild animal. 
The effect was magical. Its eyes filled as if 
with rain-drops, and its lips trembled as it 
pressed them to the flower. After this it was 
perfectly quiet, and brought a measure of corn 
to the man-tamer, without showing the least 
disposition to strike with the feet or hit from 
the shoulder." 



242 THE AUTOCKAT OF THE 

That will do for the Houylinlinms Gazette, 
— JJo you ever wonder why poets talk so much 
about flowers? Did you ever hear of a poet 
who did not talk about them? Don't you 
think a poem, which, for the sake of being 
original, should leave them out, would be like 
those verses where the letter a or e or some 
other is omitted? No, — they will bloom over 
and over again in poems as in the summer 
fields, to the end of time, always old and always 
new. Why should we be more shy of repeat- 
ing ourselves than the spring be tired of blos- 
soms or the night of stars? Look at Nature. 
She never wearies of saying over her floral 
pater-noster. In the crevices of Cyclopean 
walls, — in the dust where men lie, dust also, — 
on the mounds that bury huge cities, the Birs 
Nemroud and the Babel-heap, — still that same 
sweet prayer and benediction. The Amen! of 
Nature is always a flower. 

Are you tired of my trivial personalities, — 
those splashes and streaks of sentiment, some- 
times perhaps of sentimentality, which you may 
see when I show you my heart's corolla as if it 
were a tulip? Pray, do not give yourself the 
trouble to fancy me an idiot whose conceit it 
is to treat himself as an exceptional being. It 
is because you are just like me that I talk and 
know that you will listen. We are all splashed 
and streaked with sentiments, — not with pre- 
cisely the same tints, or in exactly the same 
patterns, but by the same hand and from the 
same palette. 

I don't believe any of 3'ou hapjien to have 
just the same passion for the blue hyacinth 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 24S 

^vhicli I have, — very certainly not for the 
crushed lilac-leaf -buds; many of you do not 
know how sweet they are. You love the smell 
of the sweet-fern and the bayberry-leaves, I 
don't doubt; but I hardly think that the last 
bewitches you with young memories as it does 
me. For the same reason I come back to dam- 
ask roses, after having raised a good many of 
the rarer varieties. I like to go to operas and 
concerts, but there are queer little old hom.ely 
sounds that are better than music to me. 
However, I suppose it's foolish to tell such 
things. 

It is pleasant to be foolish at the right 

time, — said the divinity-student; — saying it^ 
however, in one of the dead languages, which 
I think are unpopular for summer-reading, and 
therefore do not bear quotation as such. 

Well, now, — said I, — suppose a good, clean, 
wholesome-looking countryman's cart stops 
opposite my door. — Do I want any huckle- 
berries? — If I do not, there are those that do. 
Thereupon my soft-voiced handmaid bears out 
a large tin pan, and then the wholesome coun- 
tryman, heaping the peck-measure, spreads his 
broad hands around its lower arc to confine 
the wild and frisky berries, and so they run 
nimbly along the narrowing channel until they 
tumble rustling down in a black cascade and 
tinkle on the resounding metal beneath. — I 
won't say that this rushing huckle-berry hail- 
storm has not more music for me than the 
" Anvil Chorus." 

1 wonder how my great trees are com« 

ing on this summer. 



244 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

Where are your great trees. Sir? — said 

the divinity-student. 

Oh, all round about New England. I call 
all trees mine that I have put my wedding-ring 
on, and I have as many tree-wives as Brigham 
Young has human ones. 

One set's as green as the other, — ex- 
claimed a boarder, who has never been identi- 
fied. 

They're all Bloomers, — said the young fel- 
low called John. 

[I should have rebuked this trifling with 
language, if our landlady's daughter had not 
asked me just then what I meant by putting my 
wedding-ring on a tree.] 

Why, measuring it with my thirty-foot tape, 
my dear, — said I. — I have worn a tape almost 
out on the rough barks of our old New Eng- 
land elms and other big trees. — Don't you 
want to hear me talk trees a little now? 
That is one of my specialties. 

[So they all agreed that they should like to 
hear me talk about trees.] 

I want you to understand, in the first place, 
that I have a most intense, passionate fondness 
for trees in general, and have had several ro- 
mantic attachments to certain trees in particu- 
lar. Now, if you expect me to hold forth in a 
'" scientific " way about my tree-loves, — to talk, 
for instance, of the Ulmus Americana, and de- 
scribe the ciliated edges of its samara, and all 
that, — you are an anserine individual, and I 
must refer you to a dull friend who will dis- 
course to you of such matters. Whnt should 
you think of a lover who should describe the 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 245 

idol of his heart in the language of science, 
thus: Class, Mammalia; Order, Primates; 
Genus, Homo; Species, Europeus; Variety, 
Brown; Individual, Ann Eliza; Dental Formula^ 

2—2 1—1 2—2 3—3 
i c p m , and so on? 

2—2 1—1 2—2 3—3 
No, my friends, I shall speak of trees as we 
see them, love them, adore them in the fields, 
where they are alive, holding their green sun- 
shades over our heads, talking to us with their 
hundred thousand whispering tongues, looking 
down on us with that sweet meekness which 
belongs to huge, but limited organisms, — which 
one sees in the brown eyes of oxen, but most in 
the patient posture, the outstretched arms, and 
the heavy-drooping robes of these vast beings 
endowed with life, but not with soul, — which 
outgrow us 'and outlive us, but, stand helpless^, 
— poor things! — while Nature dresses and un- 
dresses them, like so many full-sized, but un- 
derwitted children. 

Did jou ever read old Daddy Gilpin? Slow- 
est of men, even of English men; yet delicious 
in his slowness, as is the light of a sleepy eye 
in woman. I always supposed. " Dr. Syntax "^ 
was written to make fun of him. I have a 
whole set of his works, and am very proud of 
it, with its gray paper, and open type, and long 
ff, and orange-Juice landscapes. The Pere 
Gilpin had the kind of science I like in the 
study of Nature, — a little less observation than 
White of Selborne, but a little more poetr}'. — 
Just think of applying the Linna^an system tc 
an elm! Who cares how many stamens or 



246 THE AUTO CHAT OF THE 

pistils that little brown flower, which comes 
out before the leaf, may have to classify it by? 
What we want is the meaning, the character, 
the expression of a tree, as a kind and as an 
individual. 

There is a mother-idea in each particular 
kind of tree, which, if well marked, is probably 
embodied in the poetry of every language. 
Take the oak, for instance, and we find it 
always standing as a type of strength and en- 
durance. I wonder if you ever thought of the 
single mark of supremacy which distinguishes 
this tree from all our other forest-trees? All 
the rest of them shirk the work of resisting 
gravity; the oak alone defies it. It chooses 
the horizontal direction for its limbs, so that 
their whole weight may tell, — and then 
stretches them out fifty or sixty feet, so that 
the strain may be mighty enough to be worth 
resisting. You will find, that, in passing from 
the extreme dow^nward droop of the branches 
of the weeping-willow to the extreme upward 
inclination of those of the poplar, they sweep 
nearly half a circle. At 90° the oak stops 
short; to slant upward another degree would 
mark infirmity of purpose; to bend downward, 
weakness of organization. The American elm 
betrays something of both; yet sometimes, as we 
shall see, puts on a certain resemblance to its 
sturdier neighbor. 

It won't do to be exclusive in our taste about 
trees. There is hardly one of them which has 
not peculiar beauties in some fitting place for 
it. I remember a tall poplar of monumental 
proportions and aspect, a vast pillar of glossy 



i 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 247 

green, placed on the summit of a lofty hill, and 
a beacon to all the country round. A native 
of that region saw fit to build his house very 
near it, and, having a fancy that it might blow 
down some time or other, and exterminate him- 
self and any incidental relatives who might be 
" stopping " or " tarrying " with him, — also 
laboring under the delusion that human life is 
under all circumstances to be preferred to vege- 
table existence, — had the great poplar cut 
down. It is so easy to say, " It is only a pop- 
lar! ^' and so much harder to replace its living 
€one than to build a granite obelisk! 

I must tell you about some of my tree-wives. 
I was at one period of my life much devoted 
to the young lady-population of Rhode Island, a 
small, but delightful State, in the neighborhood 
of Pawtucket. The number of inhabitants 
being not very large I had leisure, during my 
visits to the Providence Plantations, to inspect 
the face of the country in the intervals of more 
fascinating studies of physiognomy. I heard 
some talk of a great elm a short distance from 
. the locality Just mentioned. " Let us see the 
great elm," — I said, and proceeded to find it, 
— knowing that it was on a certain farm in a 
place called Johnston, if I remember rightly. 
I shall never forget my ride and my introduc- 
tion to the great Johnston elm. 

I always tremble for a celebrated tree when 
I approach it for the first time. Provincial- 
ism has no srnle of excellence in man or vege- 
table; it never knows a first-rate article of either 
kind when it has it, iind is constiintly taking 



248 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

second and third rate ones for Nature's best. 
I have often fancied the tree was afraid of me, 
and that a sort of a shiver came over it as over 
a betrothed maiden when she first stands before 
the unknown to whom she has been pHghted. 
Before the measuring-tape the proudest tree of 
them all quails and shrinks into itself. All 
those stories of four or five men stretching 
their arms around it and not touching each 
other's fingers^, of one's pacing the shadow at 
noon and making it so many hundred feet, die 
upon its leafy lips in the presence of the awful 
ribbon which has strangled so many false 
pretensions. 

As I rode along the pleasant way, watching 
eagerly for the object of my journey, the 
rounded tops of the elms rose from time to time 
at the road-side. Wherever one looked taller 
and fuller than the rest, I asked myself, — "Is 
this it ? " But as I drew nearer, they grew 
smaller, — or proved, perhaps, that two standing 
in line had looked like one, and so deceived me. 
At last, all at once, when I was not thinking 
of it, — I declare to you it makes my flesh creep 
when I think of it now, — aU at once I saw a 
great, green cloud swelling in the horizon, so 
vast, so symmetrical, of such Olympian majesty 
and imperial supremacy among the lesser for- 
est-growths, that my heart stopped short, then 
jumped at my ribs as a hunter s]')rings at a 
five-barred gate, and I felt all through me, 
without need of uttering the words, — " Tliis 
is it! " 

You will find this tree described, with many 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 249 

others, in the excellent Eeport upon the Trees 
and Shrubs of Massachusetts. The author has 
given my friend the Professor credit for some 
of his measurements, but measured this tree 
himself, carefully. It is a grand elm for si23e 
of trunk, spread of limbs, and muscular de- 
velopment, — one of the first, perhaps the first, 
of the first class of New England elms. 

The largest actual girth I have ever found 
at five feet from the ground is in the great elm 
lying a stone's throw or two north of the main 
road (if my points of the compass are right) in 
Springfield. But this has much the appearance 
of having been formed by the union of two 
trunks growing side by side. 

The West-Springfield elm and one upon 
Northampton meadows belong also to the first 
class of trees. 

There is a noble old wreck of an elm at Hat- 
field, which used to spread its claws out over a 
circumference of thirty-five feet or more be- 
fore they covered the foot of its bole up with 
earth. This is the American elm most like an 
oak of any I have ever seen. 

The Shefiield elm is equally remarkable for 
size and perfection of form. I have seen noth- 
ing that comes near it in Berkshire County, 
and few to compare with it anywhere. I am 
not sure that I remember any other first-class 
elms in New England, but there may be many. 

What makes a first-class elm? — Why, 

size, in the first place, and chiefly. Anything 
over twenty feet of clear girth, five feet above 
the ground, and with a spread of branches % 



250 THE AUTOCKAT OF THE 

hundred feet across, may claim that title, ae* 
oording to my scale. All of them, with the 
questionable exception of the Springfield tree 
above referred to, stop, so far as my experi- 
ence goes, at about twenty-two or twenty-three 
feet of girth and a hundred and twenty of 
spread. 

Elms of the second class, generally ranging 
from fourteen to eighteen feet, are compara- 
tively common. The queen of them all is that 
glorious tree near one of the churches in 
Springfield. Beautiful and stately she is be- 
yond all praise. The " great tree '' on Boston 
Common comes in the second rank, as does the 
one at Cohasset, which used to have, and proba- 
bly has still, a head as round as an apple-tree^ 
and that at Newburyport, with scores of others 
which might be mentioned. These last two 
have perhaps been over-celebrated. Both, 
however, are pleasing vegetables. The poor 
old Pittsfield elm lives on its past reputation. 
A wig of false leaves is indispensable to make 
it presentable. 

[I don't doubt there may be some monster- 
elm or other, vegetating green, but inglorious, 
in some remote New England village, which 
only wants a sacred singer to make it celebra- 
ted. Send us your measurements, — (certified 
by the postmaster, to avoid possible imposition,) 
— circumference five feet from soil, length of 
line from bough-end to bough-end^ and we will 
see what can be done for 3^ou.] 

1 wish somebody would get us up the 

iQllowing work:— 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 251 



SYLVA NOVANGLICA. 

Photographs of New England Elms and 
other Trees, taken upon the Same Scale of 
Magnitude. With Letter-Press Descriptions, 
by a Distinguished Literary Gentleman. Bos- 
ton: & Co. 185 .. . 

The same camera should be used, — so far as 
possible, — at a fixed distance. Our friend, who 
is giving us so many interesting figures in his 
^' Trees of America,''' must not think this Pros- 
pectus invades his province; a dozen portraits, 
with lively descriptions, would be a pretty 
complement to his larger work, which, so far 
•as published, I find excellent. If my plan 
were carried out, and another series of a dozen 
English trees photographed oji the same scale, 
the comparison would be charming. 

It has always been a favorite idea of mine to 
bring the life of the Old and the New World 
face to face, by an accurate comparison of their 
various iy\ies of organization. We should be- 
gin with man, of course; institute a large and 
exact comparison between the development of 
la pianta umana, as Alfieri called it, in differ- 
ent sections of the country, in the different 
callings, at different a^es, estimating height, 
weight, force by the dynamometer and the spi- 
rometer, and finishing off with a series of typi- 
cal photographs, giving the principal national 
physiognomies. Mr. Hutchinson has given us 
S07U0 oxcollont Enc:lish data to begin with. 

Then I would follow up this by contrasting 
the various parallel forms of life in the two 



252 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

continents. Our naturalists have often re- 
ferred to this incidentally or expressly; but the 
animus of Nature in the two half-globes of the 
planet is so momentous a point of interest to 
our race, that it should be made a subject of 
express and elaborate study. Go out with me 
into that walk which we call the Mall, and look 
at the English and American elms. The 
American elm is tall, graceful, slender-sprayed, 
and drooping as if from languor. The English 
elm is compact, robust, holds its branches up, 
and carries its leaves for weeks longer than our 
own native tree. 

Is this typical of the creative force on the 
two sides of the ocean, or not? Nothing but a 
careful comparison through the whole realm of 
life can answer this question. 

There is a parallelism without identity in 
the animal and vegetable life of the two conti- 
nents, which favors the task of comparison in. 
an extraordinary manner. Just as we have two 
trees alike in many ways, yet not the same, 
both elms, yet easily distinguishable, just so 
we have a complete flora and a fauna, which, 
parting from the same ideal, embody it with 
various modifications. Inventive power is the 
only quality of which the Creative Intelligence 
seems to be economical; just as with our largest 
human minds, that is the divinest of faculties, 
and the one that most exhausts the mind which 
exercises it. As the same patterns have very 
commonly been followed, we can see which is 
worked out in the largest spirit, and deter- 
mine the exact limitations under which the 
Creator places the movement of life in all its 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 25 d 

manifestations in either locality. We should 
find ourselves in a very false position, if it 
should prove that Anglo-Saxons can't live here, 
but die out, if not kept up by fresh supplies, as 
Dr. Knox and other more or less wise persons 
have maintained. It may turn out the other 
way, as I have heard one of our literary celebri- 
ties argue, — and though I took the other side, 
I liked his best, — that the American is the 
Englishman reinforced. 

Will you walk out and look at those 

elms with me after breakfast? — I said to the 
schoolmistress. 

[I am not going to tell lies about it, and say 
that she blushed, — as I suppose she ought to 
have done, at such a tremendous piece of gal- 
lantry as that was for our boarding-house. On 
the contrary, she turned a little pale, — ^but 
smiled brightly and said, — Yes, with pleasure, 
but she must walk toward her school. — She 
went for her bonnet. — The old gentleman op- 
posite followed her with his eyes, and said he 
wished he was a young fellow. Presently she 
came down, looking very pretty in her half- 
mourning bonnet, and carrying a school-book 
in her hand.] 

MY FIRST WALK WITH THE .SCHOOLMISTRESS. 

This is the shortest way, — said she, as we 
came to a corner. — Then we won't take it, — 
said I. — The schoolmistress laughed a little, 
and said she was ten minutes early, so she could 
go round. 

We walked under Mr. Paddock's row of Eng- 
lish elms. The gray squirrels were out looking 



254 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

for their breakfasts^ and one of them came to- 
ward us in hght, soft, intermittent leaps, until 
he was close to the rail of the burial-groand. 
He was on a grave with a broad blue-slate-stone 
at its head, and a shrub growing on it. The 
stone said this was the grave of a young man 
who was the son of an Honorable gentleman, 
and who died a hundred years ago and more. 
— Oh, yes, died, — with a small triangular mark 
in one breast, and another smaller opposite, in 
his back, where another young man's rapier had 
slid through his body; and so he la^ down out 
there on the Common, and was found cold the 
next morning, with the night-dews and the 
death-dews mingled on his forehead. 

Let us have one look at poor Benjamin's 
grave, — said I. — His bones lie where his body 
was laid so long ago, and where the stone says 
they lie, — which is more than can be said of 
most of the tenants of this and several other 
burial grounds. 

[The most accursed act of Vandalism ever 
committed within my knowledge was the up- 
rooting of the ancient gravestones in three at 
least of our city burial-grounds, and one at 
least just outside the city, and planting them in 
rows to suit the taste for S3anmetry of the per- 
petrators. Many years ago, when this dis- 
graceful process was going on under my eyes, 
I addressed an indignant remonstrance to a 
leading journal. I suppose it was deficient in 
literary elegance, or too warm in its language; 
for no notice was taken of it, and the hyena- 
horror was allowed to complete itself in the 
face of daylight. I have never got over it. 



I 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 25» 

The bones of my own ancestors, being entombed, 
lie beneath their own tablet; but the upright 
stones have been shuffled about like clie^snien;, 
and nothing short of the Day of Judgment 
will tell whose dust lies beneath any of those 
records, meant by affection to mark one small 
spot as sacred to some cherished memory. 
Shame! shame! shame! — that is all I can say. 
It was on public thoroughfares, under the eye 
of authority, that this infamy was enacted. 
The red Indians would have known better; the 
selectmen of an African kraal-village would 
have had more respect for their ancestors. I 
should like to see the gravestones which have 
been disturbed all removed, and the ground 
leveled, leaving the flat tombstones; epitaphs 
were never famous for truth, but the old re- 
proach of *'' Here lies " never had such a whole- 
sale illustration as in these outraged burial- 
places, where the stone does lie above, and the 
bones do not lie beneath.] 

Stop before we turn av/ay, and breathe a 
woman's sigh over poor Benjamin's dust. Love 
killed him, I think. Twenty years old, and 
out there fighting another young fellow on the 
Common, in the cool of that old July evening; 
— yes, there must have been love at the bottom 
of it. 

The schoolmistress dropped a rosebud she 
had in her hand, through the rails, upon 
the grave of Benjamin Woodbridge. That was 
all her comment upon what I told her. — How 
women love Bove! said I; — but she did not 
speak. 

We came opposite the head of a place or 



256 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

court running eastward from the main street. 
■ — Look down there, — I said. — My friend the 
Professor Uved in that house at the left hand, 
next the further corner, for years and years. 
He died out of it, the other day. — Died? — said 
the schoohnistress. — Certainly, — said I. — We 
die out of houses, just as w^e die out of our 
bodies. A commercial smash kills a hundred 
men's houses for them, as a railroad crash kills 
their mortal frames and drives out the immor- 
tal tenants. Men sicken of houses until they 
at last quit them, as the soift leaves its body 
when it is tired of its infirmities. The body 
has been called " the house we live in "; the 
house is quite as much the body we live in. 
Shall I tell you some things the Professor said 
the other day? — Do! — said the schoolmistress. 

A man's body, — said the Professor, — is what- 
ever is occupied by his will and his sensibility. 
The small room down there, where I wrote 
those papers you remember reading, was much 
more a portion of my body than a paralytic's 
senseless and motionless arm or leg is of his. 

The soul of a man has a series of concentric 
envelopes round it, like the core of an onion, 
or the innermost of a nest of boxes. First he 
has his natural garment of flesh and blood. 
Then, his artificial integuments, with their true 
skin of solid stuffs, their cuticle of lighter 
tissues, and their variously-tinted pigments. 
Thirdly, his domicile, be it a single chamber 
or a stately mansion. And then, the whole 
visible world, in which Time buttons him up as 
in a loose outside wrapper. 

You shall observe, — the Professor said, — for, 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 25 T 

like Mr. John Hunter and other great men, 
he brings in that shall with great eit'ect some- 
times, — you shall observe that a man's cloth- 
ing or series of envelopes do after a certain 
time mold themselves upon his individual 
nature. We know this of our hats, and are 
always reminded of it when we happen to put 
them on wrong side foremost. We soon find 
that the beaver is a hollow cast of the skull^ 
with all its irregular bumps and depressions. 
Just so all that clothes a man, even to the 
blue sky which caps his head, — a little loosely,, 
— shapes itself to fit each particular being be- 
neath it. Farmers, sailors, astronomers, poets, 
lovers, condemned criminals, all find it dif- 
ferent, according to the eyes with which they 
severally look. 

But our houses shape themselves palpably 
on our inner and outer natures. See a house- 
holder brealdng up and you will be sure of it. 
There is a shell-fish which builds all manner 
of smaller shells into the walls of its own. A 
house is never a home until we have crusted it 
with the spoils of a hundred lives besides those 
of our own past. See what these are, and yon 
can tell what the occupant is. 

I had no idea, — said the Professor, — until I 
pulled up my domestic establishment the other 
day, wdiat an enormous quantity of roots I had 
been making during the years I was planted 
there. Why, there wasn't a nook or a corner 
that some fiber had not worked its way into; 
and when I gave the last wrench, each of them 
seemed to shriek like a mandrake, as it broke 
its hold and came away 



268 THE AUTOCEAT OF THE 

There is nothing that happens, you know, 
which must not inevitably, and which does not 
actually, photograph itself in every conceiva- 
ble aspect and in all dimensions. The infinite 
galleries of the Past await but one brief 
process and all their pictures will be called 
out and fixed forever. We had a curious illus- 
tration of the great fact on a very humble 
scale. When a certain bookcase, long stand- 
ing in one place, for which it was built, was 
removed, there was the exact image on the wall 
of the whole, and of many of its portions. 
But in the midst of this picture was another, — 
the precise outline of a map which had hung 
on the wall before the bookcase was built. 
We had all forgotten everything about the map 
until we saw its photograph on the wall. 
Then we remembered it, as some day or other 
we may remember a sin which has been built 
over and covered up, when this lower universe 
is pulled away from before the wall of Infinity, 
where the wrong-doing stands self-recorded. 

The Professor lived in that house a long 
time, — not twenty years, but pretty near it. 
When he entered that door, two shadows glided 
over the threshold; five lingered in the door- 
way when he passed through it for the last 
time, — and one of the shadows was claimed by 
its owner to be longer than his own. What 
changes he saw in that quiet place! Death 
rained through every roof but his; children 
came into life, grew to maturity, wedded, 
faded away, threw themselves away; the whole 
drama of life was played in that stock-corn- 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 259 

pany's tlieater of a. dozen houses, one of which 
' was his, and no deep sorrow or severe calamity 
ever entered his dwelhng. Peace be to those 
walls, forever, — the Professor said, — for the 
many pleasant years he has passed within 
them! 

The Professor has a friend, now living at a 
distance, who has been with him in many of 
his chang(^s of place, and who follows him in 
imagination with tender interest wherever he 
goes. — In that little court, where he lived in 
ga}^ loneliness so long, — 

— in his autumnal sojourn by the Connec- 
ticut, where it comes loitering down from its- 
mountain fastnesses like a great lord, swallow- 
ing up the small proprietary rivulets .very 
quietly as it goes, until it gets proud and 
swollen and wantons in huge luxurious oxbows 
about the fair Northampton meadows, and at 
last overflows the oldest inhabitant's memory 
in profligate freshets at Hartford and all along 
its lower shores, — up in that caravansary on 
the banks of the stream where Ledyard 
launched his log canoe, and the jovial old 
Colonel used to lead the Commencement pro- 
cessions, — where blue Ascutney looked down 
from the far distance, and the hills of Beulah^ 
as the Professor always called them, rolled up 
the opposite horizon in soft clinii^ing masses, 
so suggestive of the Pilgrim's Heavenward 
Path that he used to look through his old 
" Dollond " to see if the Shining Ones were 
not within range of sight, — sweet visions, 
sweetest in those Sunday walks that carried 



■260 THE AUTOCKAT OF THE 

them by the peaceful comjuon, through the 
solemn village lying in cataleptic stillness • 
under the shadow of the rod of Moses, to the 
terminus of their harmless stroll, — the patu- 
lous fage, in the Professor's classic dialect, — 
the spreading beech, in more familiar phrase, — 
[stop and breathe here a moment, for the 
sentence is not done yet, and we have another 
long journey before us,] — 

— and again once more up among those 
other hills that shut in the amber-flowing 
Housatonic, — dark stream, but clear, like the 
lucid orbs that shine beneath the lids of au- 
burn-haired, sherry-wine-eyed demi-blondes, — 
in the home overlooking the winding stream 
and the smooth, flat meadow; looked down 
upon by wild hills, where the tracks of bears 
and catamounts may yet sometimes be seen 
upon the winter snow; facing the twin sum- 
mits which rise in the far North, the highest 
waves of the great landstorm in all this bil- 
lowy region, — suggestive to mad fancies of the 
breasts of a half-buried Titaness, stretched out 
by a stray thunderbolt, and hastily hidden 
away beneath the leaves of the forest, — in that 
home where seven blessed summers were 
passed, which stand in memory like the seven 
golden candlesticks in the beatific vision of the 
holy dreamer, — 

— in that modest dwelling we were just 
looking at, not glorious, yet not unlovely in 
the youth of its drab and mahogany, — full of 
grciit and little boys' playthings from top to 
bottom, — in all these summer or winter nests 
he was always at home and alway?^ welcome. 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 261 

This long articulated sigh of reminis- 
cences, — this calenture which shows me the 
maple-shadowed plains of Berkshire and the 
mountain-circled green of Grafton beneath the 
salt waves that come feeling their way along 
the wall at my feet, restless and soft-touching 
as blind men's busy fingers, — is for that friend 
of mine who looks into the waters of the Pa- 
tapsco and sees beneath them the same visions 
that paint themselves for me in the green 
depths of the Charles. 

Did I talk all this off to the schoolmis- 
tress? — Why, no, — of course not. I have 
been talking with you, the reader, for the last 
ten minutes. You don't think I should expect 
any woman to listen to such a sentence as that 
long one, without giving her a chance to put 
in a word? 

What did I say to the schoolmistress? 

—-Permit me one moment. I don't doubt 
your delicacy and good-breeding; but in this 
particular case, as I was allowed the privilege 
of walking alone with a very interesting 
young woman, you must allow me to remark, 
in the classic version of a familiar phrase, used 
by our blaster Benjamin Franklin, it is nullum 
tui negotii. 

When the schoolmistress and I reached the 
schoolroom door, the damask roses I spoke* of 
were so much heightened in color by exercise 
that I felt sure it would be useful to her tr? 
take a stroll like this every morning, and made 
up my mind I would ask her to let me join her 
again. 



262 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

EXTRACT FROM MY PRIVATE JOURNAL. 

{To he burned unread.) 

I am afraid I have been a fool; for I have 
told as much of myself to this young person 
as if she were of that ripe and discreet age 
which invites confidence and expansive utter- 
ance. I have been low-spirited and listless, 
lately, — it is coffee, I think, — (I observe that 
which is bought ready-growid never affects the 
head,) — and I notice that I tell my secrets too 
easily when I am downhearted. 

There are inscriptions on our hearts, which, 
like that on Dighton Eock, are never to be 
seen except at dead-low tide. 

There is woman's footstep on the sand at 
the side of my deepest ocean-buried inscrip- 
tion! 

Oh, no, no, no! a thousand times, no! 

— Yet what is this which has been shaping 
itself in my soul? — Is it a thought? — is it a 
dream? — is it a passion f — Then I know what 
comes next. 

The Asylum stands on a bright and 

breezy hill; those glazed corridors are pleasant 
to walk in, in bad weather. But there are iron 
bars to all the windows. When it is fair, 
some of us can stroll outside that very high 
fence. But I never see much life in those 
groups I sometimes meet; — and then the care- 
ful man watches them so closely! How I 
remember that sad company I used to pass on 
fine mornings, when I was a schoolboy! — B., 
with his arms full of vellow weeds, — ore from 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 263 

the gold mines which he discovered long be- 
fore we heard of California, — Y., born to 
millions, crazed by too much plum-cake, (the 
boys said,) dogged, explosive, — made a Poly- 
phemus of my weak-eyed schoolmaster, by a 
vicious flirt with a stick, — (the multi-million- 
aires sent him a trifle, it was said, to buy 
another eye with; but boys are jealous of 
rich folks, and I don't doubt the good people 
made him easy for life,) — how I remember 
them all! 

I recollect, as all do, the story of the Hall 
of Eblis, in " Vathek," and how each shape, 
as it lifted its hand from its breast, showed 
its heart, — a burning coal. The real Hall of 
Eblis stands on yonder summit. Go there on 
the next visiting-day, and ask that figure 
crouched in the corner, huddled up like those 
Indian mummies and skeletons found buried 
in the sitting posture, to lift its hand, — look 
upon its heart, and behold, not fire, but ashes. 
— Xo, I must not think of such an ending! 
Dying would be a much more gentlemanly 
way of meeting the difficulty. Make a will 
and leave her a house or two and some stocks, 
and other little financial conveniences, to take 
away her necessity for keeping school. — I 
wonder what nice young man's feet would be 
in my French slippers before six months were 
over! Well, what then? If a man really 
]oves a woman, of course he wouldn't marry 
her for the world, if he were not quite sure 
that he was the best person she could by any 
possibility marry. 

It is odd enough to read over what I 



264 THE AUTOCKAT OF THE 

have just been writing. — It is the merest fancy 
that ever was in the world. I shall never be 
married. She will; and if she is as pleasant 
as she has been so far, I will give her a silver 
tea-set, and go and take tea with her and 
her husband, sometimes. No coffee, I hope, 
though, — it depresses me sadly. I feel very 
miserably; — they must have been grinding it 
at home. — Another morning walk will be good 
for me, and I don^t doubt the schoolmistress 
will be glad of a little fresh air before school. 

-The throbbing flushes of the poetical 



intermittent have been coming over me from 
time to time of late. Did you ever see that 
electrical experiment which consists in passing^ 
a flash through letters of gold-leaf in a dark- 
ened room, whereupon some name or legend 
springs out of the darkness in characters of 
fire? 

There are songs all written out in my soul, 
which I could read, if the flash might but pass 
through them, — but the fire must come down 
from heaven. Ah! but what if the stormy 
nimbus of youthful passion has blown by, and 
one asks for lightning from the ragged curus 
of dissolving aspirations, or the silvered cumu- 
lus of sluggish satiety? I will call on her 
whom the dead poets believed in, whom living 
ones no longer worship, — the immortal maid, 
who, name her what you will, — Goddess, Muse. 
Spirit of Beauty, — sits by the pillow of every 
youthful poet, and bends over his pale fore- 
head until her tresses lie upon his cheek and 
rain their gold into his dreams. 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 265 



MUSA. 



O my lost Beauty! — hast thou folded quit* 
Thy wings of morning light 
Beyond those iron gates 
Where Life crowds hurrying to the haggard 

Fates, 
And Age upon his mound of ashes waits 

To chill our fiery dreams, 
Hot from the heart of youth plunged in his icy 
streams? 



Leave me not fading in these weeds of care, 
Whose flowers are silvered hair! — 
Have I not loved thee long, 
Though my young lips have often done thee 

wrong 
And vexed thy heaven-tuned ear with careless 
song? 
Ah, wilt thou yet return, 
Bearing thy rose-hued torch, and bid thine altar 
burn? 

Come to me! — I will flood thy silent shrine 
With my soul's sacred wine. 
And heap thy marble floors 
As the wild spice-trees waste their fragrant 

stores 
In leafy islands walled with madrepores 

And lapped in Orient seas, 
When all their feathery palms toss, plume-like, in 
the breeze. 

Come to me! — thou shalt feed on honeyed words 

Sweeter than song of birds; — 

No wailing bulbul's throat. 
No melting dulcimer's melodious note, 
When o'er the midnight wave its murmurs float, 

Thy ravished sense might soothe 
Witii flow so liquid-soft, with strain so velvet' 
smooth. 



266 ^^Hb: AUlwCiiAT OF THE 

Thou Shalt be decked with jewels, like a queen, 
Soug-ht in those bowers of green 
Where loop the clustered vines 
And the close-clinging dulcamara twines, — 
Pure pearls of Maydew where the moonlight 
shines. 
And Summer's fruited gems, 
And coral pendants shorn from Autumn's berried 
stems. 

Sit by me drifting on the sleepy waves, — 
Or stretched by grass-grown graves. 
Whose gray, high-shouldered stones. 
Carved with old names Life's time-worn roll dis- 
owns. 
Lean, lichen-spotted, o'er the crumbled bones 

Still slumbering where they lay 
While the sad Pilgrim watched to scare the wolf 
away! 

Spread o'er my couch thy visionary wing! 
Still let me dream and sing, — 
Dream of that winding shore 
Where scarlet cardinals bloom, — for me no 

more, — 
The stream with heaven beneath its liquid floor, 

And clustering nenuphars 
Springling its mirrored blue like golden-chaliced 

stars ! 
1 

Come while their balms the linden-blossoms shed! 
Come while the rose is red, — 
While blue-eyed Summer smiles 
O'er the green ripples round yon sunken piles 
Washed by the moon-wave warm from Indian 
isles. 
And on the sultry air 
The chestnuts spread their palms like holy men 
in prayer! 

Oh, for thy burning lips to fire my brain 
With thrills of wild sweet pain! — 
On life's autumnal blast. 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 26) 

tiike shriveled leaves, youth's passion-flowers are 

cast, — 
Once loving" thee, we love thee to the last! — 

I>ehold thy new-decked shrine, 
And hear once more the voice that breathed 

" Forever thine! " 



XI. 

[The company looked a little flustered one 
morning when I came in, — so much so, that I 
inquired of my neighbor, the divinity-student, 
what had been going on. It appears that the 
young fellow whom they call John had taken 
advantage of my being a little late (I having 
been rather longer than usual dressing that 
morning) to circulate several questions involv- 
ing a quibble or play upon words, — in short, 
containing that indignity to the human under- 
standing, condemned in the passages from the 
distinguished morahst of the last century and 
the illustrious historian of the present, which 
I cited on a former occasion, and known as a 
pun. After breakfast, one of the boarders 
handed me a small roll of paper containing 
some of the questions and their answers. I 
subjoin two or three of them, to show what 
a tendency there is to frivolity and meaning- 
less talk in young persons of a certain sort, 
when not restrained by the presence of more 
reflective natures. — It was asked, "Why 
tertian and quartan fevers were like certain 
short-lived insects." Some interesting physi- 
ological relation would be naturally suggested. 
The inquirer blushes to find that the answer 



268 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

is in the paltry equivocation, that they ship 
a day or two. — " Why an Englishman must 
go to the Continent to weaken his grog or 
punch." The answer proves to have no rela- 
tion whatever to the temperance-movement, 
as no better reason is given than that island- 
(or, as it is absurdly written, He and) water 
won't mix. — But when I came to the next 
question a.nd its answer, I felt that patience 
ceased to be a virtue. " Why an onion is like 
a piano " is a query that a person of sensibility 
would be slow to propose; but that in an edu- 
cated community an individual could be found 
to answer it in these words, — ^^ Because it smell 
odious," quasi, it's melodious, — is not credi- 
ble, but too true. I can show you the paper. 

Dear reader, I beg your pardon for repeat- 
ing such things. I know most conversations 
reported in books are altogether above such 
trivial details, but folly will come up at every 
table as surely as purslain and chickweed and 
sorrel will come up in gardens. This young 
fellow ought to have talked philosophy, I know 
perfectly well; but he didn't, — he made jokes.] 

I am willing, — I said, — to exercise your in- 
genuity in a rational and contemplative man- 
ner. — No, I do not prescribe certain forms of 
philosophical speculation which involve an 
approach to the absurd or the ludicrous, such 
as you may find, for example, in the folio of 
the Reverend Father Thomas Sanchez, in his 
famous tractate, " De Sancto Matrimonio." 
I will therefore turn this levity of yours to 
profit by reading you a rhymed problem, 
wrought out by my friend the Professor. 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 269 

THE DEACON'S MASTERPIECE: 

OR THE WONDERFUL " ONE-HOSS-SHAY." 

A Logical Story. 

Have you heard of the wonderful one-hoss-shay, 
That was built in such a log-ical way 
It ran a hundred years to a day, 

And then, of a sudden, it ah, but stay, 

I'll tell you what happened without delay, 
Scaring- the parson into fits, 
Erig-htening people out of their wits, — 
Have you ever heard of that, I say? 

Seventeen hundred and fifty-five, 
Georgius Secimdus was then alive, — 
Snuffy old drone from the German hive! 
That was the year when Lisbon-town 
Saw the earth open and gulp her down, 
And Braddock's army was done so brown, 
Left without a scalp to its crown. 
It was on the terrible Earthquake-day 
That the Deacon finished the one-hoss-shay. 

Now in building- of chaises, I tell you what, 
There is always somewhere a weakest spot, — 
In hub, tire, felloe, in spring- or thill. 
In panel, or crossbar, or floor, or sill. 
In screw, bolt, thoroughbrace, — lurking- still 
Find it somewhere you must and will, — 
Above or below, or within or without, — 
And that's the reason, beyond a doubt, 
A chaise breaks down, but doesn't ivear out. 

But the Deacon swore (as Deacons do. 

With an " I dew vum," or an " I tell yeou,''^) 

He would build one shay to beat the taown 

'n' the keounty 'n' all the kentry raoun'; 

It should be so built that it couldn'' break daown: 

— " Fur," said the Deacon, " 't's mighty plain 

Thut the weakes' place mus' stan' the strain; 



270 THE AUTOCEAT OF THE 

'n' the way t' fix it, uz I maintain, 

Is only jest 
To make that place uz strong uz the rest." 

So the Deacon inquired of the village folk 

Where he could find the strongest oak, 

That couldn't be split nor bent nor broke, — 

That was for spokes and floor and sills; 

He sent for lancewood to make the thills; 

The crossbars were ash, from the straightest 

trees; 
The panels of white-wood, that cuts like cheese. 
But lasts like iron for things like these; 
The hubs of logs from the " Settler's ellum," 
Last of its timber, — they couldn't sell 'em, — 
Never an ax had seen their chips, 
And the wedges fiew from between their lips. 
Their blunt ends frizzled like celery-tips; 
Step and prop-iron, bolt and screw. 
Spring, tire, axle, and linchpin too. 
Steel of the finest, bright and blue; 
Thoroughbrace bison-skin, thick and wide; 
Boot, top, dasher, from tough old hide 
Found in the pit when the tanner died. 
That was the waj " he put her through." — 
" There! " said the Deacon, " naow she'll dew! " 

Do! I tell you, I rather guess 

She was a wonder, and nothing less! 

Colts grew horses, beards turned gray, 

Deacon and deaconess dropped away. 

Children and grandchildren — where were they? 

But there stood the stout old one-hoss-shay 

As fresh as on Lisbon-earthquake-day! 

Eighteen hundred; — it came and found 

The Deacon's Masterpiece strong and sound. 

Eighteen hundred increased by ten; 

" Hahnsum kerridge " they called it then. 

Eighteen hundred and twent3" came; — 

Running' as usual; much the same. 

Thirty and forty at last arrive. 

And then come fifty, and fifty-fiVe. 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 27 i 

Little of all we value here 

Wakes on the morn of its hundredth year 

Without both feeling* and looking queer. 

In fact, there's nothing* that keeps its youth, 

So far as I know, but a tree and truth. 

(This is a moral that runs at large; 

Take it. — You're welcome. — No extra charge.) 

First of November, — the Earthquake-day. — 

There are traces of age in the one-hoss-shay, 

A general flavor of mild decay, 

But nothing local, as one may say. 

There couldn't be, — for the Deacon's art 

Had made it so like in every part 

That there wasn't a chance for one to start. 

For the wheels were just as strong as the thills, 

And the floor was just as strong as the sills, 

And the panels just as strong as the floor. 

And the whippletree neither less nor more. 

And the back-crossbar as strong as the fore. 

And spring and axle and hub encore. 

And yet, as a whole, it is past a doubt 

In another hour it will be worn out! 

First of November, 'Fifty-five! 

This morning the parson takes a drive. 

Now, small boys, get out of the way! 

Here comes the wonderful one-hoss-shay, 

T3rawn by a rat-tailed, ewe-necked bay. 

"Huddup! " said the parson. — Off went they. 

The parson was working his Sunday's text,— 
Had got to fifthli/, and stopped perplexed 
At what the — Moses — was coming next. 
All at once the horse stood still. 
Close by the meet'n-house on the hill. 

First a shiver, and then a thrill. 
Then something decidedly like a spill, — 
And the parson was sitting upon a rock. 
At hnlf-x")ast nine by the meet'n'-house clock,—" 
Just the hour of the Earthquake-shock! 
— What do you think the parson found, 
When he got up and stared around? 



172 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

The poor old chaise in a heap or mound, 
As if it had been to the mill and ground! 
You see, of course, if you're not a dunce. 
How it went to pieces all at once, — 
All at once, and nothing- first,— 
Just as bubbles do when they burst. 

End of the wonderful one-hoss-shay. 
Logic is log-ic. That's all I say. 



-I think there is one habit, — I said to 



our company a day or two afterward, — worse 
than that of punning. It is the gradual substi- 
tution of cant or flash terms for words which 
truly characterize their objects. I have known 
several very genteel idiots whose whole vocabu- 
lary had deliquesced into some half dozen 
expressions. All things fell into one of two 
great categories, — fast or slow. Man's chief 
end was to be a brick. When the great calami- 
ties of life overtook their friends, these last 
were spoken of as being a good deal cut up. 
Nine-tenths of human existence were summed 
up in the single word, bore. These expres- 
sions come to be the algebraic symbols of 
minds which have grown too weak or indolent 
to discriminate. They are the blank checks 
of intellectual bankruptcy; — you may fill tliem 
tip with what idea you like; it makes no differ- 
ence, for there are no funds in the treasury 
upon which they are drawn. Colleges and 
good-for-nothing smoking-clubs are the places 
where these conversational fungi spring up 
most luxuriantly. Don't think I undervalue 
the proper use and application of a cant word 
or phrase. It adds piquancy to conversation. 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 278 

as a mushroom does to a sauce. But it is no 
better than a toadstool, odious to the sense and 
poisonous to the intellect, when it spawns 
itself all over the talk of men and youths capa- 
ble of talking, as it sometimes does. As we 
hear flash phraseology, it is commonly the 
dishwater from the washings of English dandy- 
ism, school-boy or full-grown, wrung out of the 
three-volume novel which had sopped it up; or 
decanted from the pictured urn of Mr. Ver- 
dant Green, and diluted to suit the provincial 
climate. 

The young fellow called John spoke up 

sharply and said, it was '' rum " to hear me 
" pitchin' into fellers " for " goin' it in the 
slang line," when I used all the flash words 
myself just when I pleased. 

1 replied with my usual forbearance, 

— Certainly, to give up the algebraic symbol, 
because a or & is often a cover for ideal nihility, 
would be unwise. I have heard a child labor- 
ing to express a certain condition, involving 
a hitherto undescribed sensation, (as it sup- 
posed,) all of which could have been suffi- 
ciently explained by the participle — lored. I 
have seen a country-clergyman, with a one- 
story intellect and a one-horse vocabulary, 
who has consumed his valuable time (and 
mine) freely, in developing an opinion of a 
brother-minister's discourse which would have 
been abundantly characterized by a peach- 
down-lipped sophomore in the one word — 
sloiv. Let us discriminate, and be shy of 
absolute proscription. I am omniver-bivorous 
by nature and training. Passing by such 



274 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

words as are poisonous, I can swallow most 
others, and chew such as I cannot swallow. 

Dandies are not good for much, but they 
are good for something. They invent or 
keep in circulation those conversational blank 
checks or counters just spoken of, v/hich intel- 
lectual capitalists may sometimes find it worth 
their while to borrow of them. They are use- 
ful, too, in keeping up the standard of dress, 
which, but for them, would deteriorate, and 
become, what some old fools would have it, 
a matter of convenience, a,nd not of taste and 
art. Yes, I like dandies well enough, — on one 
condition. 

What is that, Sir? — said the divinity- 
student. 

That they have pluck. I find that lies 

at the bottom of all true dandyism. A little 
boy dressed up very fine, who puts his finger 
in his mouth and takes to crying, if other boys 
make fun of him, looks very silly. But if he 
turns red in the face and knotty in the fists, 
and makes an example of the biggest of his 
assailants, throwing off his fine Leghorn and 
his thickly-buttoned jacket, if necessary, to 
consummate the act of justice, his small tog- 
gery takes on the splendors of the crested 
helmet that frightened Astyanax. You re- 
member that the Duke said his dandy officers 
were his best officers. The " Sunday blood," 
the super-superb sartorial equestrian of our 
annual Fast-day, is not imposing or dangerous. 
But such fellows as Brummel and D'Orsay and 
Byron are not to be snubbed quite so easily. 
Look out for " la main de fer sous le gant de 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 275 

velours " (wliicli I printed in English the other 
day without quotation-marks, thinking whether 
any scarahams criticus would add this to his 
globe and roll in glory with it into the news- 
papers, — which he didn't do it, in the charm- 
ing pleonasm of the London language, and 
therefore I claim the sole merit of exposing 
the same). A good many powerful and dan- 
gerous people have had a decided dash of 
dandyism . about them. There was Alcibiades, 
the " curled son of Clinias," an accomplished 
young man, but what would be called a 
"^ swell '' in these days. There was Aristot- 
eles, a very distinguished writer, of whom you 
have heard, — o philosopher, in short, whom 
it took centuries to learn, centuries to unlearn, 
and is now going to take a generation or more 
to learn over again. Regular dandy, he was. 
So was Marcus Antonius; and though he lost 
his game, he played for big stakes, and it 
wasn't his dandyism that spoiled Ms chance. 
Petrarca was not to be despised as a scholar 
or a poet, but he was one of the same sort. So 
was Sir Humphrey Davy; so was Lord Palmer- 
ston, formerly, if I am not forgetful. Yes, — 
a dandy is good for something as such; and 
dandies such as I was just speaking of have 
rocked this planet like a cradle, — aye, and left 
it swinging to this day. — Still, if I were you, 
I wouldn't go to the tailor's, on the strength 
of these remarks, and run up a long bill which 
will render pockets a superfluity in your next 
suit. Eler/ans " nascitur, non fit.^^ A man is 
born a dandy, as he is born a poet. There are 
heads that can't wear hats; there are necks 



276 THE AUTOCRAT OF IHE 

that can't fit cravats; there are jaws that can*t 
fill out collars — (Willis touched this last point 
in one of his earlier amhrotypes, if I remember 
rightly); there are tournures nothing can hu- 
manize, and movements nothing can subdue 
to the gracious suavity or elegant languor or 
stately serenity which belong to different styles 
of dandyism. 

We are forming an aristocracy, as you may 
observe, in this countrv, — not a gratia-Dei, nor 
a jure-diviiio one, — but a de-facto upper stra- 
tum of being, which floats over the turbid 
waves of common life as the iridescent film 
you may have seen spreading over the water 
about our wharves, — very splendid, though its 
origin may have been tar, tallow, train-oil, or 
other such unctuous commodities. I say, then, 
we are forming an aristocracy; and, transitory 
as its individual life often is, it maintains 
itself tolerably, as a whole. Of course, money 
is its corner-stone. But now observe this. 
Money kept for two or three generations trans- 
forms a race, — I don't mean merely in man- 
ners and hereditary culture, but in blood and 
hone. Money buys air and sunshine, in which 
children grow up more kindly, of course, than 
in close, back streets; it buys country-places 
to give them happy and healthy summers, good 
nursing, good doctoring, and the best cuts of 
beef and mutton. When the spring-chickens 

come to market I beg your pardon, — that 

is not what I was going to speak of. As the 
yonTi,<x feinales of each successive season come 
on, the finest specimens among them, other 
things being equal, are apt to attract those 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 2l*i 

who can afford the expensive luxury of beauty. 
The physical character of the next generation 
rises in consequence. It is plain that certain 
families have in this way acquired an elevated 
type of face and figure, and that in a small 
circle of city-connections one may sometimes 
find models of both sexes which one of the 
rural counties would find it hard to match 
from all its townships put together. Because 
there is a good deal of running down, of, de- 
generation and waste of life, among the richer 
classes, you must not overlook the equali| 
obvious fact I have just spoken of, — which m 
one or two generations more will be, I think, 
much more patent than just now. 

The weak point in our chryso-aristocracy is 
the same I have alluded to in connection with 
cheap dandyism. Its thorough manhood, its 
high-caste gallantry, are not so manifest as the 
plate-glass of its windows and the more or less 
legitimate heraldry of its coach-panels. It is 
very curious to observe of how small account 
military folks are held among our Northern 
people. Our young men must gild their spurs, 
but they need not win them. The equal 
division of property keepc the younger sons of 
rich people above the necessity of military 
service. Thus the army loses an element of 
refinement, and the moneyed upper class for- 
gets what it is to count heroism among its 
virtues. Still I don't believe in any aristoc- 
racy without pluck as its backbone. Ours 
may show it wlien, the time comes, if it over 
does come. 

These United States furnish the sQ:reat- 



278 THE AUTOCEAT OF THE 

est market for intellectual green fruit of all 
the places in the world. I think so, at any 
rate. The demand for intellectual labor is so 
enormous and the market so far from nice, 
that young talent is apt to fare like unripe 
gooseberries, — get plucked to make a fool of. 
Think of a country which buys eighty thou- 
sand copies of the " Proverbial Philosoph}^/' 
while the author's admiring countrymen have 
been buying twelve thousand! How can one 
let his fruit hang in the sun until it gets fully 
ripe, while there are eighty thousand such 
hungry mouths ready to swallow it and pro- 
claim its praises? Consequently, there never 
was such a collection of crude pippins and 
half-grown windfalls as our native literature 
displays among its fruits. There are literary 
green-groceries at every corner, which will buy 
anything, from a button-pear to a pine-apple. 
It takes a long apprenticeship to train a whole 
people to reading and writing. The tempta- 
tion of money fame is too great for young 
people. Do I not remember that glorious 

moment when the late Mr. we won't say 

who, — editor of the we won't say what, 

offered me the sum of fifty cents per double- 
columned quarto page for shaking my young 
bouglis over his foolscap apron? Was it not 
an intoxicating vision of gold and glory? I 
should doubtless have reveled in its wealth 
and splendor, but for learning the fact that 
the fifty cents w^as to be considered a rhetorical 
embellishment, and by no means a literal 
expression of past fact or present intention. 
Beware of making your moral staple 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 279 

consist of the negative virtues. It is good to 
abstain, and teach others to abstain, from all 
that is sinful or hurtful. But making a busi- 
ness of it leads to emaciation of character, 
unless one feeds largely also on the more nutri- 
tious diet of active sympathetic benevolence. 

1 don't believe one word of what you 

are saying, — spoke up the angular female in 
black bombazine. 

I am sorry you disbelieve it, Madam, — ^I 
said, and added softly to my next neighbor, — 
but you prove it. 

The young fellow sitting near me winked; 
and the divinity-student said, in an under- 
tone, — Optime dictum. 

Your talking Latin, — said I, — reminds me 
of an odd trick of one of my old tutors. He 
read so much of that language, that his Eng- 
lish half turned into it. He got caught in 
town, one hot summer, in pretty close c^uar- 
ters, and wrote, or began to write, a series of 
city pastorals. Eclogues he called them, and 
meant to have published them by subscription. 
I remember some of his verses, if you want to 
hear them. — You, Sir, (addressing myself to 
the divinity-student,) and all such as have been 
through college, or, what is the same thing, 
received an honorary degree, will understand 
them without a dictionary. The old man had 
a great deal to say about " aestivation," as he 
called it, in opposition, as one might say, to 
Jiiher nation. Intramural sestivation, or town- 
life in summer, he would say, is a peculiar 
form of suspended existence or semi-asphyxia. 
One wakes up from it about the beginning of 



B80 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

the last week in September. This is what I 
remember of his poem: — 

^^STIVATION. 

An Unpublished Poem, by my late Latin Tutor, 

In candent ire the solar splendor flames; 
The foles, languescent, pend from arid rames;; 
His humid front the cive, anheling, wipes, 
And dreams of erring on ventiferous ripes. 

How dnlce to vive occult to mortal eyes, 
Dorm on the herb with none to supervise. 
Carp the suave berries from the crescent vine. 
And bibe the flow from longicaudate kine! 

To me, alas! no verdurous visions come. 
Save yon exiguous pool's conferva-scum, — 
No concave vast repeats the tender hue 
That laves my milk-jug with celestial blue. 

Me wretched! Let me curr to quercine shades! 
Effund your albid hausts, lactiferous maids! 
Oh, might I vole to some umbrageous clump, — 
Depart, — be ofl', — excede, — evade, — erump ! 

1 have lived by the seashore and by the 

mountains. — No, I am not going to say which 
is best. The one where your place is is the 
best for you. But this difference there is: 
you can domesticate mountains, but the sea is 
ferce naturcc. You may have a hut, or know 
the owner of one, on the mountain-side: you 
see a li.g:ht halfway up its ascent in the even- 
ing, nnd you know there is a home, and you 
might share it. You have noted certain tr-'cs, 
perhaps: you know the particulnr zone wliere 
the hemlocks look so black in October, when 



1JKEAK.FAST TABLE. 281 

the maples and beeches have faded. All its 
reliefs and intaglios have electrotyped them- 
selves in the medallions that hang round the 
walls of your memory's chamber. — The sea 
remembers nothing. It is feline. It licks 
your feet, — its huge flanks purr very pleasantly 
for you; but it will crack your bones and eat 
you, for all that, and wipe the crimsoned foam 
from its jaws as if nothing had happened. 
The mountains give their lost children berries 
and water; the sea mocks their thirst and lets 
them die. The mountains have a grand, 
stupid, lovable tranquillity; the sea has a fas- 
cinating, treacherous intelligence. The moun- 
tains lie about like huge ruminants, their broad 
backs awful to look upon, but safe to handle. 
The sea smooths its silver scales until you can- 
not see their joints, — but their shining is that 
of a snake's belly, after all. — In deeper sug- 
gesliveness I find as great a difference. The 
mountains dwarf mankind and foreshorten the 
procession of its long generations. The sea 
drowns out humanity and time; it has no sym- 
pathy with either; for it belongs to eternity, 
and of that it sings its monotonous song for- 
ever and ever. 

Yet I should love to have a little box by 
the seashore. I should love to gaze out on the 
wild feline element from a front window of 
my own, just as I should love to look on a 
caged panther, and see it stretch its shining 
length, and then curl over and lap its smooth 
sides, and by and by begin to lash itself into 
rage and show its white teeth and spring at its 
bars, and howl the cry of its mad, but, to me, 



282 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

harmless fury. — And then, — to look at it with 
that inward eye, — who does not love to shuffle 
off time and its concerns, at intervals, — to for- 
get who is President and who is Governor, 
what race he belongs to, whaj language he 
speaks, which golden-headed nail of the firma- 
ment his particular planetary system is hung 
upon, and listen to the great liquid metro- 
nome as it beats its solemn measure, steadily 
swinging when the solo or duet of human life 
began, and to swing just as steadily after the 
human chorus has died out and man is a fossil 
on its shores? 

What should decide one, in choosing a 

summer residence? — Constitu.tion, first of all. 
How much snow could you melt in an hour, if 
you were planted in a hogshead of it? Com- 
fort is essential to enjoyment. All sensitive 
people should remember that persons in easy 
circumstances suffer much more from cold in 
summer — that is, the warm half of the year — 
than in winter, or the other half. You must 
cut your climate to your constitution, as much 
as your clothing to your shape. After this, 
consult your taste and convenience. But if 
you would be happy in Berkshire, you must 
carry mountains in your brain; and if you 
would enjoy Nahant, you must have an ocean 
in your soul. Nature plays at dominos with 
you; you must match her piece, or she will 
never give it up to you. 

The schoolmistress said, in rather a 

mischievous way, that she was afraid some 
minds or souls would be a little crowded, if 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 283 

they took in the Rocky Mountains or the 
Atlantic. 

Have you ever read the little book called 
'■^The Stars and the Earth"?— said I.— Have 
you seen the Declaration of Independence 
photographed in a surface that a fly's foot 
would cover? The forms or conditions of 
Time and Space, as Kant will tell you, are 
nothing in themselves, — only our way of look- 
ing at things. You are right, I think, how- 
ever, in recognizing the category of Space as 
being quite as applicable to minds as to the 
outer world. Every man of reflection is 
vaguely conscious of an imperfectly defined 
circle which is drawn about his intellect. He 
has a perfectly clear sense that the fragments 
of his intellectual circle include the curves of 
many other minds of which he is cognizant. 
He often recognizes these as manifestly concen- 
tric with his own, but of less radius. On the 
other hand, when we find a portion of an arc 
outside of our own, we say it intersects ours, 
but are very slow to confess or to sse that it 
circumscribes it. Every now and then a man's 
mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, 
and never shrinks back to its former dimen- 
sions. After looking at the Alps, I felt that 
my mind had been stretched beyond the limits 
of its elasticity, and fitted so loosely on my old 
ideas of space that I had to spread these to 
fit it. 

If I thought I should ever see the Alps! 

— said the schoolmistress. 

Perhaps you will, some time or other, — I 
said. 



284 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

It is not very likely, — she answered. — I 
kave had one or two opportunities, but I had 
rather be anything than governess in a rich 
family. 

[Proud, too, you little soft-voiced woman! 
Well, I can't say I like you any the worse for 
it. How long will school-keeping take to kill 
you? Is it possible the poor thing works with 
her needle, too? I don't like those marks on 
the side of her forefinger. 

Tableau. Chamouni. Mont Blanc in full 
view. Figures in the foreground; two of them 
standing apart; one of them a gentleman 

of oh, — ah, — yes! the other a lady in a 

white cashmere, leaning on his shoulder. — The 
ingenuous reader will understand that this was 
an internal, private, personal, subjective dio- 
rama, seen for one instant on the background 
of my OAvn consciousness, and abolished into 
black nonentity by the first question which 
recalled me to actual life, as suddenly as if one 
of those iron shop-blinds (which I always pass 
at dusk with a shiver, expecting to stumble 
over some poor but honest shop-boy's head, 
just taken off by its sudden and unexpected 
descent, and left outside upon the sidewalk) 
had come down " by the run."] 

Should you like to hear what moderate 

wishes life brings one to at last? I used to 
be very ambitious, — wasteful, extravagant, 
and luxurious in all my fancies. Eead too 
much in the '^ Arabian Nights." Must have 
the lamp, — couldn't do without the ring. Ex- 
ercise every morning on the brazen horse. 
Plump down into castles as full of little 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 285 

milk-white princesses as a nest is of young 
sparrows. All love me dearly at once. — 
Charming idea of life, but too high-colored for 
the reality. I have outgrown all this; my 
tastes have become exceedingly primitive, — 
almost, perhaps, ascetic. We carry happiness 
into our condition, but must not hope to find 
it there. I think you will be willing to hear 
some lines which embody the subdued and 
limited desires of my maturity. 

CONTENTMENT. 

" Man wants but little here below." 

Little I ask; my wants are lew; 

I only wish a hut of stone, 
(A very plain brown stone will do,) 

That I may call my own; — 
And close at hand is such a one. 
In 3^onder street that fronts the sun. 

Plain food is quite enough for me; 

Three courses are as good as ten; — 
If Nature can subsist on three, 

Thank Heaven for three. Amen! 
I always thought cold victual nice; — 
My choice would be vanilla-ice. 

I care not much for g-old or land; — 

Give me a mortgage here and there, — 
Some good bank-stock, — some note of hand 

Or trifling railroad share; — 
I only ask that Fortune send 
A little more than I shall spend. 

Honors are silly toys, I know, 

And titles are but empty names; — 
i woiikl, perhaps, be Plenlpo, — 

But only near St. James; — 
I'm very sure I should not care 
To fill our Gabernator's chair. 



286 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

Jewels are baubles; 'tis a sin 

To care for such unfruitful things; — 
One good-sized diamond in a pin, — 
Some, not so large, in rings, — 
A ruby, and a pearl, or so, 
Will do for me; — I laugh at show. 

My dame should dress in cheap attire; 
(Good, heavy silks are never dear;)— 
I own X3erhaps I might desire 

Some shawls of true cashmere, — 
Some marrowy crapes of China silk, 
Like wrinkled skins on scalded milk. 



I would not have the horse I drive 

So fast that folks must stop and stare; 
An easy gait — two, forty-five — 

Suits me; I do not care; — 
Perkaps, for just a single spurt, 
Some seconds less would do no hurt. 



Of pictures, I should like to own 

Titians and RajDhaels three or four, — 
I love so much their style and tone, — 

One Turner, and no more 
(A landscape,^ — foreground golden dirt; 
The sunshine painted with a squirt). 

Of books but few, — some fifty score 
For daily use, and bound for wear; 
The rest upon an uj^per floor; — 

Some little luxury there 
Of red morocco's gilded gleam. 
And vellum rich as country cream. 

Busts, cameos, gems, — such things as these. 

Which others often show for pride, 
/ value for their power to please. 
And sellish churls deride; — 
0}ie Stradivarius, I confess, 
Tivo Meerschaums, I would fain possess. 



t 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 281 

Wealth's wasteful tricks I will not learn. 
Nor ape the glittering upstart fool; — 
Shall not carved tables serve my turn, 

But all must be of buhl? 
Give grasping- pomp its double share, — 
I ask but OJiG recumbent chair. 

Thus humble let me live and die, 

Nor long- for jNIidas' golden touch; 
If Heaven more generous gifts deny, 
I shall not miss them mnch^ — 
Too grateful for the blessing lent 
Of simple tastes and mind content! 

MY LAST WALK WITH THE SCHOOLMISTKESS. 

{A Parenthesis.) 

I can't sa.y just how many walks she and I 
had taken together before this one. I found 
the effect of going out every morning was 
decidedly favorable on her health. Two pleas- 
ing dimples, the places for which were just 
marked when she came, played, shadowy, in 
her freshening cheeks when she smiled and 
nodded good-morning to me from the school- 
house-steps. 

I am afraid I did the greater part of the 
talking. At any rate, if I should try to report 
all that I said during the first half-dozen walks 
we took together, I fear that I might receive 
a gentle hint from my friends the publishers, 
that a separate volume, at my own risk and 
expense, would be the proper method of bring- 
ing them before the public. 

1 would have a woman as true as Death. 

At the first real lie which works from the 
hocrt Cut7.'.T>r5., she should bo tenderly chloro- 



'288 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

formed into a better world, where she can have 
an angel for a governess, and feed on strange 
fruits which will make her all over again, even 
to her bones and marrow. — Whether gifted 
with the accident of beauty or not, she should 
have been molded in the rose-red clay of Love, 
before the breath of life made a moving mor- 
tal of her. Love-capacity is a congenital en- 
dowment; and I think, after a while, one gets 
to know the warm-hued natures it belongs to 
from the pretty pipe-clay counterfeits of it. — 
Proud she may be, in the sense of respecting 
herself; but pride, in the sense of contemning 
others less gifted than herself, deserves the two 
lowest circles of a vulgar woman's Inferno, 
where the punishments are Small-pox and 
Bankruptcy. — She who nips off the end of a 
brittle courtesy, as one breaks the tip of an 
icicle, to bestow upon those whom she ought 
cordially and kindly to recognize, proclaims 
the fact that she comes not merely of low 
blood, but of bad blood. Consciousness of 
unquestioned position makes people gracious in 
proper measure to all; but if a woman puts on 
airs with her real equals, she has something 
about herself or her family she is ashamed of, 
or ought to be. Middle, and more than 
middle-aged people, who know family his- 
tories, generally see through it. An official of 
standing was rude to me once. Oh, that is the 
in.aternal grandfather, — said a wise old friend 
to me, — he was a boor. — Better too few words, 
from the woman we love, than too many: while 
she is silent, Nature is working for her; while 
she talks, she is working for herself. — Love is 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 289' 

sparingly ooluble in the words of men; there- 
fore they speak much of it; but one syllable 
of woman's speech can dissolve more of it than 
a man's heart can hold. 

Whether I said any or all of these things 

to the schoolmistress, or not, — whether I stole 
them out of Lord Bacon, — whether I cribbed 
them from Balzac, — whether I dipped J;hem 
from the ocean of Tupperian wisdom, — or 
whether I have just found them in my head, 
laid there by that solemn fowl. Experience, 
(wdio, according to my observation, cackles 
oftener than she drops real live eggs,) I can- 
not say. Wise men have said more foolish 
things, and foolish men, I don't doubt, have 
said as wise things. Anyhow, the schoolmis- 
tress and I had pleasant walks and long talks, 
all of which I do not feel bound to report. 

You are a stranger to me. Ma'am. — I 

don't doubt you would like to know all I said 
to the schoolmistress. — I shan't do it; — I had 
rather get the publishers to return the money 
you have invested in this. Besides, I have for- 
gotten a good deal of it. I shall tell only what 
I like of what I remember. 

My idea was, in the first place, to search 

out the picturesque spots which the city affords 
a sight of, to those who have eyes. I know a 
good many, and it was a pleasure to look at 
them in company with my young friend. 
There were the shrubs and flowers in the- 
Franklin-Place front-yards or borders; Com- 
merce is just putting his granite foot u])on 
them. Then there are certain small seraglio- 
gardens, into which one can get a peep through 



290 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

the crevices of high fences, — one in Myrtle 
Street, or backing on it, — here and there one 
at the i^orth and South Ends. Then the 
^reat ehns in Essex Street. Then the stately 
horse-chestnuts in that vacant lot in Chambers 
street, which hold their outspread hands over 
your head, (as I said in my poem the other 
day,) and look as if they were whispering 
" May grace, mercy, and peace be with you! " — 
•and the rest of that benediction. Nay, there 
are certain patches of ground, which, having 
lain neglected for a time. Nature, who always 
has her pockets full of seeds, and holes in all 
■her pockets, has covered with hungry plebeian 
growths, which fight for life with each other, 
until some of them get broad-leaved and suc- 
culent, and you have a coarse vegetable tapestry 
which Eaphael would not have disdained to 
spread over the foreground of his masterpiece. 
The Professor pretends that he found such a 
-one in Charles Street, which, in its dare- 
devil impudence of rough-and-tumble vegeta- 
tion, beat the pretty-behaved flower-beds of 
the Public Garden as ignominiously as a group 
of young tatterdemalions playing pitch-and- 
toss beats a row of Sunday-school-boys with 
their teacher at their head. 

But then the Professor has one of his bur- 
Tows in that region, and puts everything in 
high colors relating to it. That is his way 

•^about everything. 1 hold any man cheap, — 

he said, — of whom nothing strop. o'or opr<^ be 

uttered than that all his geese are swans. 

How is tiiat. Professor? — said 1; — 1 siiould 
have set you down for one of that surt.- Sir, 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 291 

—said he, — I am proud to say that Nature has 
so far enriched me, that I cannot own so much. 
as a duclc without seeing in it as pretty a swan 
as ever swam the basin in the garden of the 
Luxembourg. And the Professor showed the 
whites of his eyes devoutly, like one returning 
thanks after a dinner of many courses. 

I don't know anything sweeter than this 
leaking in of Nature through all the cracks in 
the walls and floors of cities. You heap up a 
million tons of hewn rocks on a square mile or 
two of earth which was green once. The trees- 
look down from the hill-sides and ask each 
other, as they stand on tiptoe, — " What are 
these people about ? " And the small herbs at 
their feet look up and whisper back, — " We 
will go and see." So the small herbs pack 
themselves up in the least possible bundles, 
and wait until the wind steals to them at night 
and whispers, — " Come with me." Then they 
go softly with it into the great city, — one to a. 
cleft in the pavement, one to a spout on the 
roof, one to a seam in the marbles over a rich 
gentleman's bones, and one to the grave with- 
out a stone where nothing but a man is 
buried, — and there they grow, looking down- 
on the generations of men from moldy roofs,, 
looking up from between the less-trodden pave- 
ments, looking out through iron cemetery- 
railings. Listen to them, when there is onlj 
a light breath stirring, and you will hear them 
saying to each other, — " Wait awhile! " The 
words run along the telegraph of those narrow 
green lines that border the roads leading from 
the city, until they reach the slope of the hills^^ 



292 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

and the trees repeat in low murmurs to each 
other, — " Wait awhile! " By and by the flow of 
life in the street ebbs, and the old leafy in- 
habitants — the smaller tribes always in front — 
saunter in, one by one, very careless seemingly, 
but very tenacious, until they swarm so that 
the great stones gape from each other with the 
crowding of their roots, and the feld-spar be- 
gins to be picked out of the granite to find 
them food. At last the trees take up their 
solemn line of march, and never rest until they 
have encamped in the market-place. Wait 
long enough and you will find an old doting 
oak hugging a huge worn block in its yellow 
underground arms; that was the corner-stone 
of the State-House. Oh, so patient she is, this 
imperturbable Nature! 

Let us cry! 

But all this has nothing to do with my walks 
and talks with the schoolmistress. I did not 
say that I would not tell you something about 
them. Let me alone, and I shall talk to you 
more than I ought to, probably. We never 
tell our secrets to people that pump for them. 

Books we talked about, and education. It 
was her duty to know something of these, and 
of course she did. Perhaps I was somewhat 
more learned than she, but I found that the 
difference between her reading and mine was 
like that of a man's and a woman's dusting a 
library. The man flaps about with a bunch of 
feathers; the woman goes to work softly with 
a cloth. She does not raise half the dust, 7ior 
fill her own eyes and moutli ivith it,-— Lut she 
.goes into all the corner?, and attends to the 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 293 

leaves as much as the covers. — Books are the 
negative pictures of thought, and the more sen- 
sitive the mind that receives their images, the 
more nicely the finest lines are reproduced. A 
woman, (of the right kind,) reading after a 
man, follows him as Ruth followed the reapers 
of Boaz, and her gleanings are often the finest 
of the wheat. 

But it was in talking of Life that we came 
most nearly together. I thought I knew some- 
thing about that, — that I could speak or write 
about it somewhat to the purpose. 

To take up this fluid earthly being of ours 
as a sponge sucks up water, — to be steeped and 
soaked in its realities as a hide fills its pores 
lying seven years in a tan-pit, — to have win- 
nowed every wave of it as a mill-wheel works 
up the stream that runs through the flume 
upon its float-boards, — to have curled up in 
the keenest spasms and flattened out in the 
laxest languors of this breathing-sickness 
which keeps certain parcels of matter uneasy 
for three or four score years, — to have fought 
all the devils and clasped all the angels of its 
delirium, — and then, just at the point when 
the white-hot passions have cooled down ta 
cherry-red, plunge our experience into the ice- 
cold stream of some human language or other, 
one might think would end in a rhapsody with 
something of spring and temper in it. All 
this I thought my power and province. 

Tlie schoolmistress had tried life, too. Once 
m a while one meets with a single soui greater 
than fill the living pageant that passes before 
It. As the pale astronomer sits in liis study 



294 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

with sunken eyes and thin fingers, and weighs 
Uranus or Neptune as in a balance, so there 
are meek, slight women who have weighed all 
that this planetary life can offer, and hold it 
like a bauble in the palm of their slender 
hands. This was one of them. Fortune had 
left her, sorrow had baptized her; the routine 
of labor and the loneliness of almost friendless 
^ity-life were before her. Yet, as I looked 
upon her tranquil face, gradually regaining a 
cheerfulness that was often sprightly, as she 
became interested in the various matters we 
talked about and places we visited, I saw that 
eye and lip and every shifting lineament were 
made for love, — unconscious of their sweet 
office as yet, and meeting the cold aspect of 
Duty with the natural graces which were meant 
for the reward of nothing less than the Great 
Passion. 

1 never spoke one word of love to the 

schoolmistress in the course of these pleasant 
walks. It seemed to me that we talked of 
everything but love on that particular morn- 
ing. There was, perhaps, a little more timidity 
and hesitancy on my part than I have com- 
monly shown among our people at the board- 
ing-house. In fact, I considered myself the 
master at the breakfast-table; but, somehow, I 
could not command myself just then so well as 
usual. The truth is, I had secured a passage 
to Liverpool in the steamer which was to leave 
;at noon, — with the condition, however, of 
being released in case circumstances occurred 
"to detain me. The schoolmistress knew noth- 
ing about all this, of course, as yet. 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 295 

It was on the Common that we were walk- 
ing. The mall, or boulevard of our Common, 
you know, has vaiious branches leading from 
it in different directions. One of these runs 
downward from opposite Joy Street southward 
across the whole length of the Common to 
Boylston Street. We called it the long path, 
and were fond of it. 

I felt very weak indeed (though of a toler- 
ably robust habit) as we came opposite the head 
of this path on that morning. I think I tried 
to speak twice without making myself dis- 
tinctly audible. At last I got out the ques- 
tion, Will you take the long path with 

me? Certainly, — said the schoolmistress, — 

with much pleasure. Think, — I said, — be- 
fore you answer; if you take the long path 
with me now, I shall interpret it that we are to 

part no more! The schoolmistress stepped 

back with a sudden movement, as if an arrow 
had struck her. 

One of the long granite blocks used as seats 
was hard by, — the one you may still see close 

by the Gingko-tree. Pray, sit down, — I 

said. No, no, — she answered, softly, — I will 

walk the long path with you! 

The old gentleman who sits opposite 

met us walking, arm in arm, about the middle 
of the long path, and said, very charmingly, — ■ 
" Good morning, my dears! " 



296 THE AUTOCEAT OF THE 



XII. 



[I DID not think it probable that I should 
have a great many more talks with our com- 
pany, and therefore I was anxious to get as 
much as I could into every conversation. 
That is the reason why you will find some odd, 
miscellaneous facts here, which I wished to tell 
at least once, as I should not have a chance to 
tell them habitually, at our breakfast-table. — 
We're very free and easy, you know; we don't 
read what we don't like. Our parish is so 
large, one can't pretend to preach to all the 
pews at once. Besides, one can't be all the 
time trying to do the best of one's best; if a 
company works a steam fire-engine, the firemen 
needn't be straining themselves all day to 
squirt over the top of the flagstaff. Let them 
wash some of those lower-story windows a 
little. Besides, there is no use in our quarrel- 
ing now, as you will find out when you get 
through this paper.] 

Travel, according to my experience, 

does not exactly coiTespond to the idea one 
gets of it out of most books of travels. I am 
thinking of travel as it vv^as Mdien I made the 
Grand Tour, especially in Italy. Memory is a 
net; one finds it full of fish when he takes it 
from the brook; but a dozen miles of water 
have run through it without sticking. I can 
prove some facts about traveling by a story or 
two. There are certain principles to be 
assumed, — such as these: — He who is carried 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 297 

by horses must deal with rogues. — To-day's 
dinner subtends a larger visual angle than 
yesterday's revolution. — A mote in my eye is 
bigger to me than the biggest of Dr. Gould's 
private planets. — Every traveler is a self-taught 
entomologist. — Old jokes are djrQamometers 
of mental tension; an old joke tells better 
among friends traveling than at home, — which 
shows that their minds are in a state of dimin- 
ished, rather than increased vitality. There 
was a story about " strahps to your pahnts," 
which was a vastly funny to us fellows — on the 
road from Milan to Venice. — Ccelum, non ani- 
mum, — travelers change their guineas, but not 
their characters. The bore is the same, eating 
dates under the cedars of Lebanon, as over a 
plate of baked beans in Beacon Street. — Par- 
ties of travelers have a morbid instinct for 
" establishing raws " upon each other. — A man 
shall sit down with his friend at the foot of 
the Great Pyramid and they will take up the 
question they had been talking about under 
'' the great elm," and fors^et all about Egypt. 
When I was crossing the Po, we were all fight- 
ing about the propriety of one fellow's telling 
another that his argument was absurd; one 
maintaining it to be a perfectly admissible logji- 
cal term, as proved by the phrase, " reductio 
^d absurdum "; the rest badgering him as 
a conversational bully. Mighty little we 
troubled ourselves for Padus, the Po, "' a river 
broader and more rapid than the Ehone," and 
the times when Hannibal led his grim Africans 
to its banks, and his elephants thrust their 



298 THE AUTOCKAT OF THE 

trunks into the yellow waters over which tha;t 
pendulum ferry-boat was swinging back and 
forward every ten minutes! 

Here are some of those reminiscences, 

with morals prefixed, or annexed, or implied. 

Lively emotions very commonly do not strike 
us full in front, but obliquely from the side; 
a scene or incident in undress often affects 
more than one in full costume. 

" Is this the mighty ocean? — is this all? " 

says the Princess in Gebir. The rush tiiat 
should have flooded my soul in the Coliseum 
did not come. But walking one day in the 
fields about the city, I stumbled over a frag- 
ment of broken masonry, and lo! the World's 
Mistress in her stone girdle — alta mosnia 
Romce — rose before me and whitened my cheek 
with her pale shadow as never before or since. 
I used very often, when coming home from 
my morning's work at one of the public insti- 
tutions of Paris, to stop in at the dear old 
church of St. Etienne du Mont. The tomb of 
St. Genevieve, surrounded by burning candles 
and votive tablets, was there; the mural tablet 
of Jacobus Benignus Winslow was there; there 
was a noble organ with carved figures; the 
pulpit was borne on the oaken shoulders of a 
stooping Samson; and there was a marvelous 
staircase like a coil of lace. These things I 
mention from memory, but not all of tiiem 
together impressed me so much as an inscrip- 
tion on a small slab of marble fixed in one of 
the walls. It told how this church of St. Ste- 
phen was repaired and beautified in the year 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 299 

16**, and how durins: the celebration of its 
reopening, two girls of the parish {filles de la 
pa n.'isse) fell frotn the gallery, carrying a part 
of the balustrade with them, to the pavement, 
but by a miracle escaped uninjured. Two 
young girls, nameless, but real presences to my 
imagination, as much as when they came flut- 
tering down on the tiles with a cry that out- 
screamed the sharpest treble in the Te Deum! 
(Look at Carlyle's article on Boswell, and see 
how he speaks of the poor young woman John- 
son talked with in the streets one evening.) 
All the crowd gone but these two " filles de la 
paroisse," — gone as utterly as the dresses they 
wore, as the shoes that were on their feet, as the 
bread and meat that were in the market on 
that day. 

Not the great historical events, but the per- 
sonal incidents that call up single sharp pic- 
tures of some human being in its pang or 
struggle, reach us most nearly. I remember 
the "platform at Berne, over the parapet of 
which Theobald Weinzapfli's restive horse 
sprung with him and landed him more than a 
hundred feet beneath in the lower town, not 
dead, but sorely broken, and no longer a wild 
youth, but God's servant from that day for- 
ward. I have forgotten the famous bears, and 
all else. — I remember the Percy lion on the 
bridge over the little river at Aln^^nck, — the 
leaden lion with his tail stretched out straight 
lil'Te a pump-handle, — and why? Because of 
the story of the village boy who must fain be- 
stride the leaden tail, standing out over the 
water, — which breaking, he dropped into the 



300 Tiil;. ALTUCKAT OF THE 

stream far below, and was taken out an idiot 
for the rest of his life. 

Arrow-heads must be brought to a sharp 
point, and the guillotine-ax must have a slant- 
ing edge. Something intensely human, nar- 
row, and definite pierces to the seat of our sen- 
sibilities more readily than huge occurrences 
and catastrophes. A nail will pick a lock 
that defies hatchet and hammer. The Royal 
George went down with all her crew, and 
Cowper wrote an exquisitely simple poem 
about it; but the leaf that holds it is smooth, 
while that which bears the lines on his 
mother's portrait is blistered with tears. 

My telling these recollections sets me think- 
ing of others of the same kind that strike the 
imagination, especially .when one is still young. 
You remember the monument in Devizes mar- 
ket to the woman struck dead with a lie in her 
mouth. I never saw that, but it is in the 
books. liere is one I never heard men- 
tioned; — if any of the " Note and Query " tribe 
can tell the story, I hope they will. Where is 
this monument? I was riding on an English 
stage-coach when we passed a handsome marble 
column (as I remember it) of considerable size 
and pretensions. — What is that? — I said. — 
That, — answered the coachman, — is ilie liang- 
man's 'pillar. Then he told me how a man 
went out one night, many years ago, to steal 
sheep. He caught one, tied its legs together, 
passed the rope over his head, a.nd started for 
home. In climbing a fence, the rope slipped, 
caught him by the neck, and strangled him. 
Next morning he was found hanging dead on 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 301 

one side of the fence and the sheep on the 
other; in memory whereof the lord of the 
manor caused this monument to be erected as 
a warning to all who love mutton better than 
virtue. I will send a copy of this record to 
him or her who shall first set me right about 
this column and its locality. 

And telling over these old stories reminds 
me that I have something that may interest 
architects and perhaps some other persons. 
I once ascended the spire of Strasburg Cathe- 
dral, which is the highest, I think, in Europe. 
It is a shaft of stone filigree-work frightfully 
open, so that the guide puts his arms behind 
you to keep you from falling. To climb it is 
a noonday nightmare, and to think of having 
climbed it crisps all the fifty-six joints of one's 
twenty digits. While I was on it, "pinnacled 
dim in the intense inane," a strong wind was 
blowing, and I felt sure that the spire was 
roclving. It swayed back and forward like a 
stalk of rye or a cat-o'~nine-tails (bulrush) with 
a bobolink on it. I mentioned it to the guide, 
and he said that the spire did really svnng back 
and forv/ard, — I think he said some feet. 

Keep any line of knowledge ten years and 
some other line will intersect it. Long after- 
ward I was hunting out a paper of Dumeril's 
in an old journal, — the Magazin Encyclope- 
diqiiG for Van troisiems, (1795,) when I 
stumbled upon a brief article on the vibrations 
of the spire of Strasburg Cathedral. A man 
can shake it so that the movement shall be 
shown in a vessel of water nearly seventy feet 
below the summit, and higher up the vibra- 



302 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

tioii is like that of an earthquake. I have 
seen one of those wretched wooden spires with 
which we very shabbily finish some of our stone 
churches (thinking that the lidless blue eye of 
heaven cannot tell the counterfeit we try to 
pass on it) swinging like a reed, in a wind, but 
one would hardly think of such a thing's hap- 
pening in a stone spire. Does the Bunker- 
Hill monument bend in the blast like a blade 
of grass? I suppose so. 

You see, of course, that I am talking in a 
cheap way; — perhaps we will have some phi- 
losophy by and by; — let me work out this thin 
mechanical vein. — I have something more to 
say about trees. I have brought down this 
sHce of hemlock to show you. Tree blew down 
in my woods (that were) in 1852. Twelve feet 
and a half round, fair girth; — nine feet, where 
I got my section, higher up. This is a wedge, 
going to the center, of the general shape of a 
slice of apple-pie in a large and not opulent 
family. Length, about eighteen inches. I 
have studied the growth of this tree by its 
rings, and it is curious. Three hundred and 
forty-two rings. Started, therefore, about 
1510. The thickness of the rings tells the 
rate at which it grew. For five or six yeai-s 
the rate was slow, — thea rapid for twenty 
years. A little before the year 1550 it began 
to grow very slowly, and so continued for about 
seventy years. In 1620 it took a new start and 
grew fast until 1714; then for the most part 
slowly until 1786, when it started again and 
grew pretty well and uniformly : until within 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 30S 

the last dozen years, when it seems to have got 
on sluggishly. 

Look here. Here are some human lives laid 
down against the periods of its growth, to 
which they corresponded. This is Shakspeare's^ 
The tree was seven inches in diameter when he 
was born; ten inches when he died. A little 
less than ten inches when Milton was born; 
seventeen when he died. Then comes a long 
interval, and this thread marks out Johnson's 
life, during which the tree increased from 
twenty-two to twenty-nine inches in diameter^ 
Here is the span of Napoleon's career; — the 
tree doesn't seem to have minded it. 

I never saw the man yet who was not startled 
at looking on this section. I have seen many 
wooden preachers, — never one like this. How 
much more striking would be the calendar 
counted on the rings of one of those awful 
trees which were standing when Christ was on 
earth, and where that brief mortal life is 
chronicled with the stolid apathy of vegetable 
being, which remembers all human history as 
a thing of yesterday in its own dateless 
existence! 

I have something more to say about elms. 
A relative tells me there is one of great glory 
in Andover, near Bradford. I have some 
recollections of the former place, pleasant and 
other. [I wonder if the old Seminary clock 
strikes as slowly as it used to. My room-mate 
thought, when he first came, it was the bell 
tolling deaths, and people's ages, as they do in 
the country. He swore — (ministers' sons get 



304 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

SO familiar with good words tliat they are apt 
to handle them carelessl}^) — that the children 
were dying by the dozen, of all ages, from one 
to twelve, and ran off next day in recess, when 
it began to strike eleven, but was caught before 
the clock got through striking.] At the foot 
of " the hill," down in town, is, or was, a tidy 
old elm, which was said to have been hooped 
with iron to protect it from Indian tomahawks, 
(Credat Hahnemannus,) and to have grown 
round its hoops and buried them in its wood. 
Of course, this is not the tree my relative 
means. 

Also, I have a very pretty letter from Nor- 
wich, in Connecticut, telling me of two noble 
elms which are to be seen in that town. One 
hundred and twenty-seven feet from bough- 
end to bough-end! What do you say to that? 
And gentle ladies beneath it, that love it and 
celebrate its praises! And that in a town of 
such supreme, audacious, Alpine loveliness as 
Norwich! — Only the dear people there must 
learn to call it Norridge, and not be misled by 
the mere accident of spelling. 

Porc/Mnouth. 
Cincinnata/i. 

What a sad picture of our civilization! 

I did not speak to you of the great tree on 
what used to be the Colman farm, in Deerfield, 
simply because I had not seen it for many 
years, and did not like to trust my recollection. 
But I had it in memory, and even noted down, 
as one of the finest trees in symmetry and 



BiiEAKFAST TAIiLE. 305 

beauty I had ever seen. I have received a 
document, signed by two citizens of a neigh- 
boring town, certified by the postmaster and a 
selectman, and these again corroborated re- 
inforced, and sworn to by a member of that 
extraordinary college-class to which it is the 
good fortune of my friend the Professor to 
belong, who, though he has formerly been a 
member of Congress, is, I believe, fully worthy 
of confidence. The tree " girts " eighteen and 
a half feet, and spreads over a hundred, and is 
a real beauty. I hope to meet my friend under 
its branches yet; if we don't have " youth at 
the prow," we will have " pleasure at the 
^elm." 

And just now, again, I have got a letter 
about some grand willows in Maine, and an- 
other about an elm in Wayland, but too late 
for anything but thanks. 

[And this leads me to say, that I have re- 
ceived a great many communications, in prose 
and verse, since I began printing these notes. 
The last came this very morning, in the shape 
of a neat and brief poem, from New Orleans. 
I could not make any of them public, though 
sometimes requested to do so. Some of them 
have given me great pleasure, and encouraged 
me to believe I had friends whos^ faces 1 Iiad 
never seen. If you are pleased with anything 
a writer says, and doubt whether to tell him 
of it, do not hesitate; a pleasant word is a 
cordial to one, who perhaps thinks he is tir- 
ing you, and so becomes tired himself. I purr 
very loud over a good, honest letter that says 
pretty things to me.] 



306 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

Sometimes very young persons send 

communications, which they want forwarded 
to editors; and these young persons do not 
always seem to have right conceptions of these 
same editors, and of the public, and of them- 
selves. Here is a letter I wrote to one of these 
young folks, but, on the whole, thought it best 
not to send. It is not fair to single out one 
for such sharp advice, where there are hun- 
dreds that are in need of it. 

Dear Sir, — ^You seem to be somewhat, but 
not a great deal, wiser than I was at your age. 
I don't wish to be understood as saying too 
much, for I think, without committing myself 
to any opinion on my present state, that I was 
not a Solomon at that stage of development. 

You long to " leap at a single bound into 
celebrity." Nothing is so commonplace as to 
wish to be remarkable. Fame usually comes 
to those who are thinking about something 
else, — very rarely to those who say to them- 
selves, " Go to, now, let us be a celebrated indi- 
vidual! " The struggle for fame, as such, 
commonly ends in notoriety; — that ladder is 
easy to climb, but it leads to the pillory which 
is crowded with fools who could not hold their 
tongues and rogues who could not hide their 
tricks. 

If you have the consciousness of genius, do 
something to show it. The world is pretty 
quick, nowadays, to catch the flavor of true 
originality; if you write anything remarkable, 
the magazines and newspapers will llnd you 
out, as the school-boys fmd out where the ripe 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 307 

apples and pears are. Produce anything really 
good, and an intelligent editor will jump at it. 
Don't flatter yourself that any article of yours 
is rejected because you are unknown to fame. 
Nothing pleases an editor more than to get 
anything worth having from a new hand. 
There is always a dearth of really fine articles 
for a first-rate journal; for, of a hundred 
pieces received, ninety are at or below the sea- 
level; some have water enough, but no head; 
some head enough,, but no water; only two or 
three are from full reservoirs, high up that 
hill which is so hard to climb. 

You may have genius. The contrary is of 
course probable, but it is not demonstrated. 
If you have, the world wants you more than 
you want it. It has not only a desire, but a 
passion, for every spark of genius that shows 
itself among us; there is not a bull-calf in our 
national pasture that can bleat a rhyme but it 
is ten to one, among his friends and no takers,, 
that he is the real, genuine, nomistake Osiris. 

QiCest ce qu'il a fait? What has he done? 
That was Napoleon's test. What have you 
done? Turn up the faces of your picture- 
cards, my boy! You need not make mouths 
at the public because it has not accepted you 
at your own fancy-valuation. Do the prettiest 
thing you can and wait your time. 

For the verses you send me, I will not say 
they are hopeless, and I dare not affirm that 
they show promise. I am not an editor, but 
I knov.^ the standard of some editors. You 
must not expect to " leap with a single bound '^ 
into the society of those whom it is not flattery 



308 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

to call your betters. When The PactoliaH, 
has paid you for a copy of verses, — (I can fur- 
nish you a list of alliterative signatures, begin- 
ning with Annie Aureole and ending with Zoe 
Zenith,) — when The Ragbag has stolen your 
piece, after carefully scratching your name 
out, — when The Nut-cracker has thought 
you worth shelling, and strung the kernel 
of your cleverest poem, — then, and not 
till then, you may consider the presumption 
against you, from the fact of your rhyming 
tendency, as called in question, and let our 
friends hear from you, if you think it worth 
while. You may possibly think me too can- 
did, and even accuse me of incivility; but let 
me assure you that I am not half so plain- 
spoken as Nature, nor half so rude as Time. 
If you prefer the long jolting of public opinion 
to the gentle touch of friendship, try it like a 
man. Only remember this, — that, if a bushel 
of potatoes is shaken in a market-cart without 
springs to it, the small potatoes always get to 
the bottom. Believe me, etc., etc. 

I always think of verse-writers, when I am 
in this vein; for these are by far the most 
exacting, eager, self-weighing, restless, queru- 
lous, unreasonable literary persons one is like 
to meet with. Is a young man in the habit of 
writing verses? Then the presumption is that 
he is an inferior person. For, look you, there 
are at least nine chances in ten that he writes 
foor verses. Now the habit of chewing on 
rhymes without sense and soul to match them 
is, like that of using any other narcotic, at 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 309 

once a proof of feebleness and a debilitating 
agent. A young man can get rid of the pre- 
sumption against him afforded by his writing 
verses only by convincing us that they are 
verses worth writing. 

All this sounds hard and rough, but, observe, 
it is not addressed to any individual, and of 
course does not refer to any reader of these 
pages. I would always treat any given young 
person passing through the meteoric showers 
which rain down on the brief period of ado- 
lescence with great tenderness. God forgive 
lis, if we ever speak harshly to young creatures 
on the strength of these ugly truths, and so, 
sooner or later, smite some tender-souled poet 
or poetess on the lips who might have sung the 
world into sweet trances, had we not silenced 
the matin-song in its first low breathings! 
Just as my heart yearns over the unloved, just 
so it sorrows for the ungifted who are doomed 
to the pangs of an undeceived self-estimate. I 
have always tried to be gentle with the most 
hopeless cases. My experience, hov^^ever, has 
not been encouraging. 

X. Y., £et. 18, a chcaply-got-up youth,, 

with narrow jaws, and broad, bony, cold, red 
hands, having been laughed at by the girls in 
his village, and " got the mitten " (pronounced 
mittin) two or three times, falls to souling and 
controlling, and youthing and truthing, in the 
newspapers. Sends me some strings of verses, 
candidates for the Orthopedic Infirmary, all of 
them, in which I learn for the millionth time 
one of the following facts: either that some- 
thing about a chime is sublime, or that some- 



310 THE AUTOCEAT OF THE 

thing about time is sublime, or that something 
about a chime is concerned with time, or that 
something about a rhyme is sublime or con- 
cerned with time or with a chime- Wishes my 
opinion of the same, with advice as to his 
future course. 

What shall I do about it? Tell him the 
whole truth, and send him a ticket of admis- 
sion to the Institution for Idiots and Feeble- 
minded Youth? One doesn't like to be 
cruel, — and yet one hates to lie. Therefore 
one softens down the ugly central fact of 
donkeyism, — recommends study of good 
models, — that writing verse should be an inci- 
dental occupation only, not interfering with 
the hoe, the needle, the lapstone, or the ledger, 
- — and, above all, that there should be no 
hurry in printing what is written. Not the 
least use in all this. The poetaster who has 
tasted type is done for. He is like the man 
who has once been a candidate for the Presi- 
dency. He feeds on the madder of his delu- 
sion all his days, and his very bones grow red 
with the glow of his foolish fancy. One of 
these young brains is like a bunch of India 
crackers; once touch fire to it and it is best 
to keep hands off until it has done popping, — 
if it ever stops. I have two letters on file; 
one is a pattern of adulation, the other of 
impertinence. My reply to the first, contain- 
ing the best advice I could give, conveyed in 
courteous language, had brought out the 
second. There was some sport in this, but 
Dullness is not commonly a game fish, and onl;^ 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 311 

sulks after he is struck. You may set it down 
as a truth which admits of few exceptions, that 
those who ask your opinion really want your 
praise, and will be contented with nothing 
less. 

There is another kind of application to 
which editors, or those supposed to have access 
to them, are liable, and which often proves 
trying and painful. One is appealed to in be- 
half of some person in needy circumstances 
who wishes to make a living by the pen. A 
manuscript accompanying the letter is offered 
for publication. It is not commonly brilliant, 
too often lamentably deficient. If Rachel's 
saying is true, that " fortune is the measure of 
intelligence," then poverty is evidence of 
limited capacity, which it too frequently proves 
to be, notwithstanding a noble exception here 
and there, ^ow an editor is a person under a 
contract with the public to furnish them with 
the best things he can afford for his money. 
Charity shown by the publication of an inferior 
article would be like the generosity of Claude 
Duval and the other gentlemen highwaymen, 
who pitied the poor so much they robbed the 
rich to have the means of relieving them. 

Though I am not and never was an editor, I 
know something of the trials to which they are 
submitted. They have nothing to do but to 
develop enormous calluses at every point of 
contact with authorship. Their i3usiness is 
not a matter of sympathy, but of intellect. 
They must reject the unfit productions of 
those whom they long to befriend, because it 



Si 2 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

would be a profligate charity to accept them. 
One cannot burn his house down to warm the 
hands even of the fatherless and the widow. 

THE PKOFESSOR UNDER CHLOROFOEM. 

-You haven't heard about my friend the 



Professor's first experiment in the use of 
anaesthetics, have you? 

He was mightily pleased v:ith the reception 
of that poem of his about the chaise. He 
spoke to me once or twice about another poem 
of similar character he wanted to read me, 
which I told him I would listen to and criticize. 

One day, after dinner, he came in with his 
face tied up, looking very red in the cheeks 
and heavy about the eyes. — Hy'r'ye? — he said, 
and made for an armchair, in which he placed 
first his hat and then his person, going smack 
through the crown of the former as neatly as 
they do the trick at the circus. The Professor 
jumped at the explosion as if he had sat down 
on one of those small caltJirops our grand- 
fathers used to sow round in the grass when 
there were Indians about, — iron stars, each ray 
a rusty thorn an inch and a half long, — stick 
through moccasins into feet, — cripple 'em on 
the spot, and give 'em lockjaw in a day or two. 

The Professor let off one of those big words 
which lie at the bottom of the bc?t man's 
vocabulary, but perhaps never turn up in his 
life, — just as every man's hair may stand on 
end, but in most men it never does. 

After he had got calm, he pulled out a sheet 
or two of manuscript, togetlier with a smaller 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 313 

acrap, on which, as he said, he had just been 
writing an introduction or prelude to the maiui 
performance. A certain suspicion had come 
into my mind that the Professor was not quite 
right, which was confirmed by the way he 
talked; but I let him begin. This is the way 
he read it: — 



Prelude. 

I'm the fellah that tole one day 

The tale of the won'erful one-hoss-shay. 

Wan' to hear another? Say. 

—Funny, wasn't it? Made me laugh, — 

I'm too modest, I am, by half, — 

Made me laugh 's tliougli I sJi'd split, — 

Cahn' a fellah like fellah's own wit? 

— Fellahs keep sayin',— " Well, now that's nice; 

Did it once, but cahn' do it twice." — 

Don' you believe the'z no more fat; 

Lots in the kitch'n 'z good 'z that. 

Fus'-rate throw, 'n' no mistake, — 

Han' us the props for another shake; — 

Know I'll try, 'n' guess I'll win; 

Here sh' goes for hit 'm ag'in! 



Here I thought it necessary to interpose. — « 
Professor, — I said, — you are inebriated. The 
style of what you call your " Prelude " shows 
that it was written under cerebral excitement. 
Your articulation is confused. You have told 
me three times in succession, in exactly the 
same vrords, that I was the only true friend 
you had in the world that you would unbutton 
your heart to. You smell distinctly and de- 
cidedly of spirits. — I spoke, and paused; ten- 
der, but firm. 



314 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

Two large tears orbed themselves beneath 
the Professor's lids^ — in obedience to the prin- 
ciple of gravitation celebrated in that delicious 
bit of bladdery bathos^, " The very law that 
molds a tear/' with which the Ediiiburgli 
Review attempted to put down Master George^ 
Gordon when that young man was foolishly 
trying to make himself conspicuous. 

One of these tears peeped over the edge of 
the lid until it lost its balance, — slid an inch 
and waited for reinforcements, — swelled 
again, — rolled down a little further, — stopped, 
— moved on, — and at last fell on the back of 
the Professor's hand. He held it up for me to 
look at, and lifted his eyes, brimful, till they 
met mine. 

I couldn't stand it, — I always break down 
when folks cry in my face, — so I hugged him,, 
and said he was a dear old boy, and asked him 
kindly what was the matter with him, and what 
made him smell so dreadfully strong of spirits. 

Upset his alcohol lamp, — he said, — and spilt 
the alcohol on his legs. That was it. — But 
what had he been doing to get his head into 
such a state? — had he really committed an 
excess? What was the matter? — Then it came 
out that he had been taking chloroform to have 
a tooth out, which had left him in a very queer 
state, in which he had written the " Prelude " 
given above, and under the influence of which, 
he evidently was still. 

I took the manuscript from his hands and 
read the ff-l^o'ving continuation of the lines 
he had b^n"i- 'o read me, while he made up for 
two or threo ' * Jihts' lost sleep as he best might. 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 315 

PARSON TURELL'S LEGACY: 

OK, THE president's OLD ARM-CHAIR. 

Pacts respecting- an old arm-chair. 
At Cambridge. Is kept in the Colleg-e" there. 
Seems but little the worse for wear. 
That's remarkable when I say 
It was old in President Holyoke's day. 
(One of his boys, perhaps you know, 
Died, at one hundred, years ago.) 
He took lodging" for rain or shine 
Under green bed-clothes in '69. 

Know old Cambridge? Hope you do. — 
Born there? Don't say so! I was, too. 
(Born in a house with a gambrel-roof, — 
Standing still, if you must have proof. — 
"Gambrel? — Gambrel? " — Let me beg 
You'll look at a horse's hinder leg, — 
First great angle above the hoof, — 
That's the gambrel; hence gambrel-roof.) 
■ — Nicest place that ever was seen, — 
Colleges red and Common green, 
Sidewalks brownish with trees between. 
Sweetest spot beneath the skies 
When the canker-worms don't rise, — 
When the dust, that sometimes flies 
Into your mouth and ears and eyes, 
In a quiet slumber lies. 
Not in the shape of unbaked pies 
Such as barefoot children prize. 

A kind of harbor it seems to be. 
Facing the flow of a boundless sea. 
Rows of gray old Tutors stand 
Ranged like rocks above the sand; 
Rolling beneath them, soft and green, 
Breaks the tide of bright sixteen, — 
One wave, two waves, three waves, four. 
Sliding v.x) the sparkling floor; 
Then it ebbs to flow no more, 
Wandering off from shore to shore 
With its freight of golden ore! 



516 THE AUTOCIIAT OF THE 

— Pleasant place for boys to play; — 

Better keep your girls away; 

Hearts get rolled as pebbles do 

Which countless fing'ering- waves pursue. 

And every classic beach is strown 

With heart-shaped pebbles of blood-red stone. 

But this is neither here nor there; — 
I'm talking" about an old arm-chair. 
You've heard, no doubt, of Parson Turell? 
Over at Medford he used to dwell; 
Married one of the Mather's folk; 
Got with his wife a chair of oak, — 
Funny old chair, with seat like wedg^e, 
Sharp behind and broad front edg"e, — 
One of the oddest of human thing's, 
Turned all over with knobs and rings, — 
But heavy, and wide, and deep, and grand, — 
Fit for the worthies of the land, — 
Chief-Justice Sewall a cause to try in. 
Or Cotton Mather to sit — and lie — in. 
— Parson Turell bequeathed the same 
To a certain student, — Smith by name; 
These were the terms, as we are told: 
*' Saide Smith saide Chaire to have and holde; 
When he doth graduate, then to passe 
To ye oldest Youth in ye Senior Classe, 
On Payment of " — (naming a certain sum) — 
" By him to whom ye Chaire shall come; 
He to ye oldest Senior next. 
And soe forever," — (thus runs the te^it,) — 
" But one Crown less than he gave to claime. 
That being his Debte for use of same." 

Smith transferred it to one of the Browns, 
And took his money, — five silver crowns. 
Brown delivered it up to Moore, 
Who i)aid, it is plain, not five, but four. 
Moore m.ade over the chair tc Lee, 
Who gave him crowns of silver three. 
Lee conveyed it unto Drew, 
And nov/ the payment, of course, w^as two. 
Drew gave up the chair to Dunn, — 
All he got, as you see, was one. 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 31^ 

Dunn released the chair to Hall, 

And got by the bargain no crown at all. 

■ — And now it passed to a second Brown, 

Who took it, and likewise claimed a crown. 

When Brotvii conveyed it unto Ware, 

Having- had one crown, to make it fair. 

He paid him two crowns to take the chair; 

And Ware, being honest, (as all Wares be,) 

He paid one Potter, who took it, three. 

Four got Robinson; five got Dix; 

Johnson prbnus demanded six; 

And so the sum kept gathering still 

Till after the battle of Bunker's Hill. 

— When paper money became so cheap. 

Folks wouldn't count it, but said " a heap," 

A certain Richards, the books declare, 

(A. M. in '90? I've looked with care 

Though the Triennial,— name not there,) 

This person, Richards, was offered then 

Eight score pounds, but would have ten; 

Nine, I think, was the sum he took, — 

Not quite certain, — but see the book. 

— By and by the wars were still, 

But nothing had altered the Parson's will. 

The old arm-chair was solid yet, 

But saddled with such a monstrous debt! 

Things grew quite too bad to bear. 

Paying' such sums to get rid of the chair! 

But dead men's fingers hold awful tight, 

And there was the will in black and white, 

Plain enough for a child to spell. 

What should be done no man could tell, 

For the chair was a kind of nightmare curse» 

And ever3^ season but made it vn orse. 

As a last resort, to clear the doubt, 
They got old Governor Hancock out. 
The Governor came with his Light-horse Troop 
And his mounted truckmen, all cock-a-hoop; 
Halberds glittered and colors fiew, 
Freneli horns whinnied and trumpets blew, 
The yellow fifes M'histled between their teeth 
And the bumble-bee bass-drums boomed beneath; 



318 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

So ke rode with all his band, 
Till the President met him, cap in hand. 
"—The Governor " hefted " the crowns, and said,— 
" A will is a will, and the Parson's dead." 
The Governor hefted the crowns. Said he, — 
" There is your p'int. And here's my fee. 
These are the terms you must fulfill, — 
On such conditions I break the will! " 
The Governor mentioned what these should be 
(Just wait a minute and then you'll see.) 
The President prayed. Then all was still, 
And the Governor rose and broke the will! 
—"About those conditions?" Well, now you go 
And do as I tell you, and then you'll know. 
Once a year, on Commencement-day, 
If you'll only take the pains to stay. 
You'll see the President in the Chair, 
Likewise the Governor sitting- there. 
The President rises; both old and youn^ 
May hear his speech in a foreign tongue. 
The meaning" whereof, as lawyers swear, 
Is this: Can I keep this old arm-chair? 
And then his Excellency bows, 
As much as to say that he allows. 
The Vice-Gub. next is called by name; 
He bows like t'other, which means the same. 
And all the officers round 'em bow. 
As much as to say that they allow. 
And a lot of parchments about the chair, 
Are handed to witnesses then and there, 
And then the lawyers hold it clear 
That the chair is safe for another year. 

God bless you, Gentlemen! Learn to give 
Money to colleg-es while you live. 
Don't be silly and think you'll try 
To bother the colleges, when you die. 
With codicil this, and codicil that, 
That Knowledg-e may starve while Law g-rows f atj 
i'or there never was pitcher that wouldn't spill. 
And there's always a flaw in a donkey's will! 

Hospitality is a good deal a matter of 

latitude, I suspect. The shade of a palm-tree 



BREAKFAST TAI5LE. 319 

serves an African for a hut; his dwelling is all 
door and no walls; everybody can come in. 
To make a morning call on an Esquimaux 
acquaintance, one must creep through a long 
tunnel; his house is all walls and no door, 
except such a one as an apple with a worm- 
hole has. One might, very probably, trace a 
regular gradation between these two extremes. 
In cities where the evenings are generally hot, 
the people have porches at their doors, where 
they sit, and this is, of course, a provocative 
to the interchange of civilities. A good deal, 
which in colder regions is ascribed to mean dis- 
positions, belongs really to mean temperature. 
Once in a while, even in our N"orthern cities, 
at noon, in a very hot summer's day, one may 
realize, by a sudden extension in his sphere of 
consciousness, how closely he is shut up for the 
most part. — Do you not remember something 
like this? July, between 1 and 2 p. m., Fahren- 
heit 96°, or thereabout. Windows all gaping, 
like the mouths of panting dogs. Long, sting- 
ing cry of a locust comes in from a tree, half a 
mile off; had forgotten there was such a tree. 
Baby's screams from a house several blocks dis- 
tant; — never knew of any babies in the neigh- 
borhood before. Tinman pounding something 
that clatters dreadfully, — very distinct, but 
don't know of any tinman's shop near by. 
Horses stamping on pavement to get off flies. 
When you hear these four sounds, you may set 
it down as a warm day. Then it is that one 
would like to imitate the mode of life of the 
native at Sierra Leone, as somebody has de- 
scribed it: stroll into the market in natural 



320 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

costume;, — buy a watermelon for a halfpenny, 
— split it, and scoop out the middle, — sit 
down in one half of the empty rind, clap the 
other on one's head, and feast upon the pulp. 

1 see some of the London journals have 

been attacking some of their literary people for 
lecturing, on the ground of its being a public 
exhibition of themselves for money. A popu- 
lar author can print his lecture; if he deliver 
it, it is a cause of qucestum corpore, or making 
profit of his person. None but " snobs " do 
that. JErgo, etc. To this I reply, — Negatur 
minor. Her Most Gracious Majesty, the 
Queen, exhibits herself to the public as a part 
of the service for which she is paid. We do 
not consider it low-bred in her to pronounce 
her own speech, and should prefer it so to hear- 
ing it from any other person or reading it. 
His Grace and his Lordship exhibit them- 
selves very often for popularity, and their 
houses every day for money. — No, if a man 
shows himself other than he is, if he belittles 
himself before an audience for hire, then he 
acts unworthily. But a true word, fresh from 
the lips of a true man, is worth paying for, at 
the rate of eight dollars a day, or even of fifty 
dollars a lecture. The taunt must be an out- 
break of jealousy against the renowned 
authors who have the audacity to be also ora- 
tors. The sub-lieutenants of the press stick a 
too popular writer and speaker with an epithet 
in England, instead of with a rapier, as in 
France. — Poh! All England is one great 
menagerie, and, all at once, the jackal, who 
admires the gilded cage of the royal beast. 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 321 

must protest against the vulgarity of the talk- 
ing-bird's and the nightingale's being willing 
to become a part of the exhibition! 

THE LONG PATH. 

(Last of the Parentheses.) 

Yes^ that was my last walk with the school- 
mistress. It happened to be the end of a term; 
and before the next began, a very nice young 
woman, who had been her assistant, was an- 
nounced as her successor, and she was provided 
for elsewhere. So it was no longer the school- 
mistress that I walked with, but Let us not 

be in unseemly haste. I shall call her the 
schoolmistress still; some of you love her under 
that name. 

When it became known among the 

boarders that two of their number had joined 
hands to walk down the long path of life side 
by side, there was, as you may suppose, no 
small sensation. I confess I pitied our land- 
lady. It took her all of a suddin, — she said. 
Had not known that we was keepin' company, 
and never mistrusted anything particular. 
Ma'am was right to better herself. Didn't 
look very rugged to take care of a femily, but 
could get hired haalp, she calc'lated. — The 
great maternal instinct came crowding up in 
her soul just then, and her eyes wandered 
until they settled on her daughter. 

No, poor, dear woman, — that could not 

have been. But I am dropping one of my in- 
ternal tears for you, with this pleasant smile on 
my face all the time. 



322 THE 4.UT0CRAT OF THE 

The great mystery of God^s pro^ddence is the 
permitted crusliing out of flowering instincts. 
Life is maintained by the respiration of oxygen 
and of sentiments. In the long catalogue of 
■ scientific cruelties there is hardly anything 
quite so painful to think of as that experiment 
of putting an animal under the bell of an air- 
pump and exhausting the air from it. [I 
never saw the accursed trick performed. Laus 
Deo!] There comes a time when the souls of 
human beings, women, perhaps, more even 
than* men, begin to faint for the atmosphere 
of the affections they were made to breathe. 
Then it is that Society places its transparent 
bell-glass over the young woman who is to be 
the subject of on^ of its fatal experiments. 
The element by which only the heart lives is 
sucked out of her crystalline prison. Watch 
her through its transparent walls; — her bosom 
is heaving; but it is in a vacuum. Death is no 
riddle, compared to this. I remember a poor 
girFs story in the '" Book of Martyrs." The 
" dry-pan and the gradual fire " were the 
images that frightened her most. How many 
have withered and wasted under as slow a tor- 
ment in the walls -of that larger Inquisition 
which we call Civilization! 

Yes, my surface-thought laughs at you, you 
foolish, plain, overdressed, mincing, cheaply- 
organized, self-saturated young person, who- 
<-ver you may be, now reading this, — little 
thinking you are what I describe, and in bliss- 
ful unconsciousness that you are destined to 
the lingering asphyxia of soul which is the lot 
of such multitudes worthier than yourseli 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 323 

But it is only my surface-thought which 
laughs. For that great procession of the un- 
loved, who not only wear tha crown of thorns, 
but must hide it under the locks of brown or 
gray, — under the snowy cap, under the chilling 
turban, — hide it even from themselves, — per- 
haps never know they wear it, though it kills 
them, — there is no depth of tenderness in my 
nature that Pity has not sounded. Some- 
where, — somewhere, — love is in store for 
them, — the universe must not be allowed to 
fool them so cruelly. What infinite pathos in 
the small, half-unconscious artifices by which 
unattractive young persons seek to recommend 
themselves to the favor of those toward whom 
our dear sisters, the unloved, like the rest, are 
impelled by their God-given instincts! 

Read what the singing-woman — one to ten 
thousand of the suffering women — tell us, and 
think of the griefs that die unspoken! Nature 
is in earnest when she makes a woman; and 
there are women enough lying in the next 
churchyard with very commonplace blue slate- 
stones at their head and feet, for whom it was 
just as true that " alt sounds of life assumed 
one tone of love," as for Letitia Landon, of 
whom Elizabeth Browning said it; but she 
could give words to her grief, and they could 
not. — Will you hear a few stanzas of mine? 

THE VOICELESS. 

We count the broken lyres tliat rest 

"Where the swpet wnilinjsr sing'ers slumber, — 

But o'er their silent sister's breast 
The wild flowers who wlii stoop to number? 



324 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

A few can touch the magic string, 

And noisy Fame is proud to win them;— » 

Alas for those that never sing, 

But die with all their music in them! 



Nay, grieve not for the dead alone 

Whose song has told their hearts' sad story ,-«? 
Weep for the voiceless, who have known 

The cross without the crown of glory! 
Not where Leucadian breezes sweep 

O'er Sappho's memory-haunted billow, 
But where the glistening nig-ht-dews weep 

On nameless sorrow's churchyard pillow. 

O hearts that break and give no sign 

Save whitening lip and fading tresses, 
Till Death pours out his cordial wine 

Slow-dropped from Misery's crushing presses,— 
If singing breath or echoing chord 

To every hidden pang were given, 
What endless melodies were poured. 

As sad as earth, as sweet as heaven! 



I hope that our landlady's daughter is not 
so badly off, after all. That young man from 
another city, who made the remark which you 
remember about Boston State-house and Bos- 
ton folks, has appeared at our table repeatedly 
of late, and has seemed to me rather attentive 
to this young lady. Only last evening I saw 
him leaning over her while she was playing the 
accordion, — indeed, I undertook to join them 
in a song, and got as far as " Come rest in this 
boo-oo," when, my voice getting tremulous, I 
turned off, as one steps out of a procession, and 
left the basso and soprano to finish it. T see no 
reason why this young woman should not be a 
very proper match for a man that laughs about 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 325 

Boston State-house. He can't be very par- 
ticular. 

The young fellow whom I have so often 
mentioned was a little free in his remarks, but 
very good-natured. — Sorry to have you go, — 
he said. Schoolma'am made a mistake not to 
wait for me. Haven't taken anything but 
mournin' fruit at breakfast since I heard of 

it. Mourning fruit, — said I, — what's that? 

Huckle-berries and blackberries — said he; 

— couldn't eat in colors, raspberries, cur- 
rants, and such, after a solemn thing like this 
happening. — The conceit seemed to please the 
young fellow. If you will believe it, when we 
came down to breakfast the next morning, he 
had carried it out as follows. You know those 
odious little " saas-plates " that figure so 
largely at boarding-houses, and especially at 
taverns, into which a strenuous attendant 
female trowels little dabs, somber of tint and 
heterogeneous of composition, which it makes 
you feel homesick to look at, and into which 
you poke the elastic coppery teaspoon with the 
air of a cat dipping her foot into a wash-tub, — 
(not that I mean to say anything against them, 
for, when they are of tinted porcelain or starry 
many-faceted crystal, and hold clean bright 
berries, or pale virgin honey, or " lucent syrups 
tinct with cinnamon," and the teaspoon is of 
white silver, with the Tower-stamp, solid, but 
not brutally heavy, — as people in the green 
stage of millionism will have them, — I can 
dally with their amber semi-fluids or glossy 
spherules without a shiver,) — you know these 
small, deep dishes, I say. When we came 



326 THE AUTOCEAT OF THE 

down the next morning, each of these (two 
only excepted) was covered with a broad leaf. 
On lifting this, each boarder found a small 
heap of solemn black huckle-berries. But one 
of those plates held red currants, and was cov- 
ered with a red rose; the other held white cur- 
rants, and was covered with a white rose. 
There was a laugh at this at first, and then a 
short silence, and I noticed that her lip trem- 
bled, and the old gentkman opposite was in 
trouble to get at his bandanna handkerchief. 

"What was the use in waiting? We 

should be too late for Switzerland, that season, 
if we waited much longer." — The hand I held 
trembled in mine, and the eyes fell meekly, as 
Esther bowed herself before the feet of 
Ahasuerus. — She had been reading that chap- 
ter, for she looked up, — if there was a film of 
moisture over her eyes, there was also the 
faintest shadow of a distant smile skirting her 
lips, but not onough to cccnt the dimples, — 
and said, in her pretty, still way, — " If it pleas3 
the king, and if I have found favor in his sight, 
and the thing seem right before the king, and 
I be pleasing in his eyes " 

I don't remember what King Ahasuerus did 
or said when Esther got just to that point of 
her soft, humble words, — but I know what I 
did. That quotation from Scripture was cut 
short, anyhow. We" came to a compromise on 
the great qi-cstion, and the time was settled 
for the last day of summer. 

In the meantime, I talked on with our 
boarders, much as usual, as you may see by 
what I have reported. I must say, I was 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 327 

pleased with a certain tenderness they all 
showed toward us, after the first excitement of 
the news was over. It came out in trivial 
matters, — but each one, in his or her way, 
manifested kindness. Our landlady, for in- 
stance, when we had chickens, sent the liver 
instead of the gizzard, with the wing, for the 
schoolmistress. This was not an accident; the 
two are never mistaken, though some land- 
ladies appear as if they did not know the dif- 
ference. The whole of the company were even 
more respectfully attentive to my remarks than 
usual. There was no idle punning, and very 
little winking on the part of that lively young 
gentleman who, as the reader may remember, 
occasionally interposed some playful question 
or remark, which could hardly be considered 
relevant, — except when the least allusion was 
made to matrimony, when he would look at 
the landlady's daughter, and wink with both 
sides of his face, until she would ask what he 
was pokin' his fun at her for, and if he wasn't 
ashamed of himself. In fact, they all behaved 
very handsomely, so that I really felt son-y at 
the thought of leaving my boarding-house. 

I suppose you think, that, because I lived at 
a plain widow-woman's plain table, I was of 
course more or less infirm in point of worldly 
fortune. You may not be sorry to leam, that, 
though not what great mercliants call very rich, 
I was comfortable, — comfortable, — so that 
most of those moderate luxuries I described in 
my verses on Contentment — most of them, I 
say — were within our reach, if we chose to have 
them. But I found out that the schoolmis- 



328 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

tress had a vein of charity about her, which 
had hitherto been worked on a small silver and 
copper basis, which made her think less, per- 
haps, of luxuries than even I did, — modestly 
as I have expressed my wishes. 

It is rather a pleasant thing to tell a poor 
young woman, whom one has contrived to win 
without showing his rent-roll, that she has 
found what the world values so highly, in fol- 
lowing the lead of her affections. That was a 
luxury I was now ready for. 

I began abruptly: — Do you know that you 
are a rich young person? 

I know that I am very rich, — she said. — 
Heaven has given me more than I ever asked; 
for I had not thought love was ever meant 
for me. 

It was a woman's confession, and her voice 
fell to a whisper as it threaded the last words. 

I don't mean that,— I said, — you blessed 
little saint and seraph! — if there's an angel 
missing in the New Jerusalem, inquire for her 
at this boarding-house! — I don't mean that; I 
mean that I — that is, you — am — are — con- 
found it! — I mean that you'll be what most 
people call a lady of fortune. — And I looked 
full in her eyes for the effect of the announce- 
ment. 

There wasn't any. She said she was thank- 
ful that I had what would save me from 
drudgery, and that some other time I should 
tell her about it. — I never made a greater 
failure in an attempt to produce a sensation. 

So the last day of summer came. It was 
our choice to go to the church, but we had a 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 329 

kind of reception at the boarding-house. The 
presents were all arranged, and among them 
aone gave more pleasure than the modest 
tributes of our fellow-boarders, — for there was 
not one, I believe, who did not send something. 
The landlady would insist on making an ele- 
gant bride-cake, with her own hands; to which 
Master Benjamin Franklin wished to add cer- 
tain embellishments out of his private funds, — 
namely, a Cupid in a mouse-trap, done in white 
sugar, and two miniature flags with the stars 
and stripes, which had a very pleasing effect, 
I assure you. The landlady's daughter sent a 
richly bound copy of Tupper's Poems. On a 
blank leaf was the following, written in a very- 
delicate and careful hand: — 

Presented to . . . by . . . 

On the eve ere her union in holy matrimony 
May sunshine ever beam o'er her! 

Even the poor relative thought she must do 
something, and sent a copy of " The Whole 
Duty of Man,'' bound in very attractive varie- 
gated sheepskin, the edges nicely marbled. 
From the divinity-student came the loveliest 
English edition of " Keble's Christian Year.'' 
I opened it, when it came, to the Fourth Sun- 
day in Lent, and read that angelic poem, 
sweeter than anything I can remember since 

Xavier's " My God, I love thee." 1 am not 

a Churchman, — I don't believe in planting 
oaks in flower-pots, — but such a poem as " The 
Rose-bud " makes one's heart a proselyte to the 
culture it grows from. Talk about it as much 
as you like, — one's breeding shows itself no- 



330 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE 

where more than in his religion. A man 
should be a gentleman in his hymns and 
prayers; the fondness for " scenes/^ among 
vulgar saints, contrasts so meanly with that — 

" God only and good angels look 
Behind the blissful scene," — 

and that other, — 

" He could not trust his melting soul 
But in his Maker's sight," 

that I hoped some of them will see this, and 
read the poem, and profit by it. 

My laughing and winking young friend 
undertook to procure and arrange the flowers 
for the table, and did it with immense zeal. I 
never saw him look happier than when he came 
in, his hat saucily on one side, and a cheroot 
in his mouth, with a huge bunch of tea-roses, 
which he said were for " Madam." 

One of the last things that came was an old 
square box, smelling of camphor, tied and 
sealed. It bore, in faded ink, the marks, 
^' Calcutta, 1805." On opening it, we found 
a white Cashmere shawl, with a very brief note 
from the dear old gentleman opposite, sapng 
that he had kept this some years, thinking he 
might want it, and many more, not knomng 
what to do with it, — that he had never seen it 
unfolded since he was a young super-cargo, — ■ 
^nd now, if she would spread it on her shoul- 
ders, it would make him feel young to look 
at it. 

Poor Bridget, or Biddy, our red-armed maid 



BREAKFAST TABLE. 331 

of all work! What must she do but buy a 
small copper breast-pin and put it under 
" Schoolma'am's " plate that morning, at 
breakfast? And Schoolma'am would wear it, 
— though I made her cover it, as well as I 
could, with a tea-rose. 

It was my last breakfast as a boarder, and -I 
could not leave them in utter silence. 

Good-by, — I said, — my dear friends, one and 
all of you! I have been long with you, and I 
find it hard parting. I have to thank you for 
a thousand courtesies, and above all for the 
patience and indulgence with which you have 
listened to me when I have tried to instruct or 
amuse you. My friend the Professor (who, as 
well as my friend the Poet, is unavoidably 
absent on this interesting occasion) has given 
me reason to suppose that he would occupy my 
empty chair about the 1st of January next. 
If he comes among you, be kind to him, as 
you have been to me. May the Lord bless you 
all! — And we shook hands all round the table. 

Half an hour afterward the breakfast things 
and the cloth were gone. I looked up and 
down the length of the bare boards, ovei* which 
I had so often uttered my sentiments and ex- 
periences — and Yes, I am a man, like 

another. 

All sadness vanished, as, in the midst of 
these old friends of mine, whom you know, and 
others a little more up in the world, perhaps, 
to whom I have not introduced you, I took the 
schoolmistress before the altar from the hands 
of the old gentleman who used to sit opposite^ 
and who would insist on giving her away. 



332 AUTOCRAT OF THE BREAKFAST TABLE. 

And now we two are walking the long path 
in peace together. The " schoolmistress * 
finds her skill in teaching called for again, 
without going abroad to seek little scholars. 
Those visions of mine have all come true. 

I hope you all love me none the less for any- 
thing I have told you. Farewell! 



THE EHIX 






t 



